Jay Spaulding
The adoption of literacy by any culture has profound implications for that community’s sense of historical time and collective memory (Ong 2002). The transition has sometimes been conceptualized in starkly dichotomous terms as a decisive and definitive transition out of an essentialized state of “orality” into one of “literacy” (Goody 1977). More sophisticated analysis would recognize the historically contingent implications of potentially numerous modes of limited literacy, and acknowledge the possibility that under some circumstances the cultural passage into literacy may be reversed (Goody 1968). The Sudan is one of the best conceivable settings in which to pursue this theme. It has a very long tradition of centralized state society. Over the millennia a number of these polities have chosen to embrace writing, in diverse languages both native and imported, usually for a limited number of fairly specific purposes.1 Episodes of literacy gave way to intervals without writing, and then to newly literate periods governed by different cultural auspices. Historical interpretation of these transitions is difficult, not only because the languages of ancient literacy are not always perfectly known, but also because comprehension of the nonliterate periods requires the reconstruction of diverse preliterate worlds, visible at best via oblique glimpses through the examination of oral literature, customary tradition, archaeology, faith, and art.
The last interregnum between literate regimes in the Sudan was the transition out of the fourteenth‐century world of medieval Christian Nubia into the early modern age of Islamic Sudanese realms such as the Funj kingdom of Sinnar (c.1500–1821). The age is “dark” to historians in the sense that it generated no extensive indigenous written documentation, but it was nevertheless a highly creative age of massive and dramatic political and cultural resurgence – a Nubian Renaissance.2 The government of the Funj kingdom, in turn, is not known to have created written documents over the first half of the history of the kingdom; it is clear, moreover, that this was a deliberate choice, for documents written by foreigners were present, and were handled appropriately, from the beginning.3 The circumstances compel a historian to assume that alternative, nonliterate, methods for the conduct of government prevailed. The burden of the present chapter is to expose the legacy of one of these nonliterate administrative technologies of the Funj kingdom.
The intellectual laboratory within which this investigation takes place, and much of the source literature upon which it rests, are the surviving Arabic charters (singular hujja, plural hujaj) from Sinnar, of which about 50 are extant.4 No existing document antedates 1700. However, it was said in the eighteenth‐century literature that some actions taken at that time confirmed previous grants that had been made several generations before by Sultan Badi b. Rubat (reigned 1054/1644–1645 to 1092/1681) (Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989: 42–43).5 There is no direct proof that Badi II recorded any of his grants in writing, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the introduction of written documents in Arabic might indeed have been a logical part of a broader historical transition presided over by him. It was Badi II who brought the hitherto perambulatory capital of the Funj to rest at Sinnar, founded the great monumental palace complex of packed earth that would dominate the conduct of Funj politics for an age to follow, and constructed the royal mosque that gave tangible expression to the realm’s Islamic loyalties. His reign also witnessed the opening of the realm to foreign influences through commerce, royally administered but staffed largely by Arabic‐speaking foreigners. Sudanese individuals took advantage of the opening of the realm to travel and to study abroad, returning with books in Arabic and ideas in a more conventionally Islamic idiom (Spaulding 2007). It was a cultural setting in which royal acts recorded in Arabic writing might well have originated. Be that as it may, by century’s end, when the extant literature of government documents in Arabic begins, Sinnar had become a populous, rich, and cosmopolitan city.
Sultan Badi’s huge new palace complex of the later seventeenth century was probably the physical setting in which the Funj kingdom’s chancery for producing Arabic documents was created.6 It was there, over the remaining century and a half of the history of Sinnar, that about a dozen Islamic holy men trained as royal scribes produced the sultans’ extant charters.7 They wrote with reed pens, using ink made from lampblack, gum arabic, and other local ingredients, on heavy, high‐quality imported paper.8 But, since their activities were new, it is important to note that they took place within a much older institution, one that may well have imposed some of its own traditions upon the scribes’ working practices.
Long before Sinnar became the capital of the Funj kingdom, it had been home to an institution known as the “treasury” (Arabic khazina).9 Sultan Badi’s new seventeenth‐century palace complex, among other things, absorbed and incorporated the older treasury institution. The treasury housed and disbursed both goods collected as taxes and exotic luxury items imported via the royally sponsored trade abroad. It manufactured and stored weapons and military gear such as suits of chain mail and horse armor. It was staffed largely by slave officials, who maintained their own unique ways of preserving knowledge; for example, they seem to have used a non‐Arabic system of written numerical notation to perform calculations using the quinary system and strings of beads both as an abacus and to store numerical data.10 It is a likely hypothesis that these demanding skill sets were probably inculcated and preserved over the centuries by an elaborate and disciplined system of unwritten training, all but invisible to the historian but undoubtedly palpable in the atmosphere surrounding the new corps of late seventeenth‐century Arabic chancery scribes.
The central treasury was administered by a high court official entitled karalrau in Funj. Each province of the kingdom had its own resident branch of the treasury institution, and the provincial treasurer reported directly to the karalrau and not the local provincial governor. It is likely that members of the new corps of Arabic scribes were sometimes dispatched to serve in the provinces in case of need; for example, at the northern provincial court of Qarri one could find a scribe named ‘Abd al‐Salam, a son of the eminent khatib of the Sinnar mosque, ‘Abd al‐Latif (Spaulding and Abu Salim (1989: 388, Document 50).11 Perhaps the scribal vocation also appeared as a stairway to advancement toward the capital in the hearts of ambitious provincial hopefuls; unfortunately, most of the sultan’s scribes are known only by name and sometimes by handwriting, their respective backgrounds and personalities being unknown. But the understanding that there existed established institutional connections and exchange of personnel between the central chancery and the courts of the provinces allows the introduction into consideration of a new group of provincial scribes, some of whom reveal another important aspect of the scribal profession of the long eighteenth century.12
During the Funj era the people of Sinnar were Muslims, an allegiance that assumed a number of fairly distinct practical commitments. One of these, and perhaps the most important from the perspective of a social historian, was a ubiquitous small‐scale, locally rooted rural Sufi organization based upon the charisma of a resident holy family.13 By fortunate coincidence, near the end of the Funj era a contemporary scholar compiled an anthology of prominent holy men, most, though not all, of whom belonged to this tradition (Hasan 1974; Abu Salim 1982). Examination of the scribes who prepared charters, particularly though not exclusively the provincial scribes, reveals highly significant family links to a number of contemporary family brotherhoods.14 It would be fair to infer that all the scribes, whatever their personal backgrounds might be, probably allowed themselves to be guided, to a greater or lesser extent, by the prevailing ethos established by the family brotherhoods.
In bureaucracy, originality is not a virtue; modern officials keep acres of approved boilerplate on file for instant retrieval and deployment, and scribes of ages past also possessed techniques to maintain the formal standards of their craft. The study of the formal characteristics of documents is the discipline of diplomatic, practiced in the European and Islamic traditions and elsewhere. Diplomatic analysis of the Sinnar charters reveals a sequence of 14 standard elements; most or all are present in each intact charter, and usually in the same order.15 One question that may be asked of the charter literature is the origin of its formal structure: Was it borrowed from one or more potential donor cultures or was it created independently in the seventeenth‐century Sudan?
The northeast quarter of the African continent has produced a number of governments that created charters whose political and social functions broadly resembled those from Sinnar. Could these chancery traditions perhaps have served as models for the scribes of Sinnar? The answer is in every case negative. One conspicuously plausible donor culture would be the older medieval Nubian tradition of the Sudan itself; however, the recent work of Giovanni Ruffini conclusively demonstrates that radical formal and conceptual differences divide the medieval charters from those of the Funj (Ruffini 2012: 156–157).16 Adjoining imperial Ethiopia created charters long before those of Sinnar, but they too bear little resemblance to the literature of the Funj kingdom (Huntingford 1965). The extant charters from Borno and the adjoining central Sudanic region are even less similar (Palmer 1967). Charters from Dar Fur are numerous and display more similarity to the Sinnar charters than do most; however, they too fail to provide a convincing donor model (Abu Salim 1975; O’Fahey and Abu Salim 1983). The reason for rejection of Funj borrowing from all these literatures is in every case similar: a Sinnar charter is considerably more sophisticated in terms of diplomatic form than anything found elsewhere in the region. No other Northeast African chancery tradition even comes close.
The Islamic heartlands offer a second literate universe of plausible cultural donors. Certainly Sudanese intellectuals of the Funj era enjoyed intimate contact with Egypt, the Holy Cities, and other influential Islamic cultural centers, and are known to have borrowed books and ideas. Among other things, the intellectual traditions of the heartlands included a very elaborate set of rules for the creation of any document that possessed legal content; these rules were enshrined and very widely disseminated in a common genre of handbooks for scribes called shurut, designed to guide writers of official documents.17 Moreover, scribes who worked for Islamic chanceries had access not only to the shurut literature of universal discourse, but also to much more elaborate manuals that laid out the specific protocols governing the appropriate forms for all manner of government documents. Representative of the tradition, and highly relevant as a fifteenth‐century Egyptian work popular long thereafter throughout the region, was the Kitab Subh al‐A‘sha of al‐Qalqashandi, a handbook of diplomatic which, in a dozen‐odd generous volumes, taught a prospective scribe exactly how to create virtually any sort of government document in the established Islamic chancery tradition (al‐Qalqashandi 1913–1919).18 Suppose, for example, one is obliged to address the issues of protocol raised by the coronation oath of a Christian Nubian king? (Holt 1990).19 Yet al‐Qalqashandi, despite his intimate familiarity with late medieval Nubian monarchy, would not have helped a Sudanese chancery scribe of the Funj era, for missing from his comprehensive compendium of document forms was the highly distinctive Sinnar charter.
Having considered and rejected all the most plausible prior and contemporary donor cultures, one may conclude that the Sinnar charter was probably not borrowed at all but was rather conceived and created by the chancery of the Funj kingdom itself.
A historian working in the age of electronic teleprompters and e‐publishing, or even the recent era of paper note cards and photocopied manuscripts, must make a deliberate, reasoned effort to understand previous times in which these aids to the preservation and conveyance of information did not yet exist. For example, when Europeans of the Renaissance period looked back upon their own beloved age of classical antiquity, they observed orators who could speak in public for several hours without notes and later dictate the same speech to a scribe. In the literature of antiquity they also discovered how such feats of intellectual retention were accomplished; data to be preserved and presented was carefully arranged and deposited in the rooms of a pre‐prepared imaginary architecture, from which the information could be retrieved by a visualized walking tour of the imaginary but subjectively familiar mansion. This technique became known as the “art of memory.”20 The art of memory, when rediscovered by Renaissance Europeans, could then be put to practical use for suitable intellectual projects such as learning Chinese.21
The idiom of Islam practiced by Sudanese family brotherhoods rested upon a base of literacy, conspicuously scripture and law.22 In both cases, however, the conceptual divide between “literacy” and “orality” was bridged or blurred by actual practice; many devout individuals committed scripture to memory, while, according to Islamic law, documents at best may assist the memory of the appropriate living witnesses whose sworn oral testimony is binding (Wakin 1972). Within the intellectual traditions of the family brotherhoods who set the tone for the contemporary practice of precolonial Islam, the higher forms of esoteric knowledge were usually preserved orally, to be transmitted from the wise to suitably prepared receptive individuals on appropriate occasions. Valuable truths were rarely committed to writing, because any literate fool could read a book!
The intact charters from Sinnar all possess the same structural elements, usually displayed in a single fixed order. However, no two are formally identical; indeed, the minor differences in phrasing are very numerous. It is therefore unlikely that new charters were prepared by copying and adapting from a written standard model. Rather, it is probable that the template upon which the scribes drew was one created and preserved in their collective memory, as one more genre of valuable esoteric knowledge, in this case secular, that should not be widely distributed among those outside the approved cadre of scribes.
One may infer that the Sinnar charter was probably an independent Sudanese invention of the later seventeenth century. The model upon which its formal structure and essential features were based was created and preserved orally among the official corps of authorized scribes as a memorized chancery template, a form of cultural archiving characteristic of both the Sudanese Sufi tradition of knowledge and – insofar as the latter is known – and the usages of the older slave bureaucracy of the Sinnar treasury.