XXXI Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 23–25 июня 2021 г. Т. 2

6 XXXI Международный Конгресс по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки Секция XIII Following Professor Dmitri Olderogge’s spirit of Pan-Africanism, my wife Ann and I made an agreement in 1961 to join the Ghana Expedition to Nubia. 1 Unfor- tunately they had to close down early. We then accepted an invitation to join the University of Chicago Expedition. The latter expedition was investigating a place which archaeologists called Serren Mátto. It was a rich archaeological site in Sudan just south of the border with Egypt. It had an ancient Egyptian fortress of the 19 th Dynasty contemporary with the great temples of Abu Simbel and a number of ruined churches from mediaeval times. We observed that geographical names provided a close affiliation between the Nubian residents of the area and the traditional places which they were about to leave forever. Therefore we decided to undertake a Survey of Nubian Place-Names. Nubian residents associated the name Serren Mátto with a larger administrative area around the archaeological area on the east bank of the Nile. Mátto means ‘east’. The n is a genitive marker. Serren Mátto means ‘East of Serre’. His Excellency [Ambassador] Jamāl MuḥammadAḥmad produced a book of lively folk tales called Stories of Serra East , Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1985. The final a in this spelling of Serra may reflect the three vowel system of written standard Arabic which makes no distinction between a and e . Nevertheless, in Nubian e and a are phonemically distinct. 1 We had attended the XXVth International Congress of Orientlists in 1960 in Moscow. However, I was in the Egyptology Section rather than the African Studies Section with Professor Dmitri A. Olderogge. His Африканистика Section proposed the First International Congress of Africanists. It took place at the University of Accra in December 11-18, 1962 with a speech of welcome by President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Royal Tomb of the X-Group in Balláañey, a name now being modernised as Balláana