Database of Medieval Nubian Identity Markers (version 1.0)

The Database of Medieval Nubian Identity Markers (DBMNIM) has been created in the framework of the project IaM NUBIAN. Identity and Memory in Christian Nubia: A study on strategies of (self-)presentation and preservation of the past in medieval African society.

The DBMNIM is a relational database which fits into a bigger structure of a database of written sources originating from the Middle Nile Valley in Middle Ages, under continuous development by myself. The basic component of this structure is the Database of Medieval Nubian Texts (DBMNT), available online at www.dbmnt.uw.edu.pl, from which the DBMNIM draws the basic metadata for any given text included in the database.

The DBMNIM has a three-level structure, represented by three interconnected tables: “Identity markers”, “IM Variants”, and “IM References”, and contains a variety of data that allow the recognition of identity(-ies) of persons occurring in the sources. For the time being, only textual identity markers are covered in the DBMNIM, but the database is designed to include also non-textual markers (graphic signs and representations, contextual information).

The database has been designed in FileMaker Pro 16 and the upload includes the original database file in the .fmp12 format. However, in order to ensure a wide accessibility, the contents of the database has been exported into .xml, .csv, and .xlsx files. For detailed information on the structure and contents of the DBMNIM, see the attached DBMNIM_upload_documentation_1_0.pdf file.