A Nubian bishop is buried under his own consecration scrolls

Timotheos was consecrated bishop of Qasr Ibrim on the Upper Nile by Patriarch Gabriel IV of Alexandria in 1372. The ceremony took place in Cairo. Three months later he was enthroned at Qamula, also in Egypt, rather than in his own cathedral. He carried home two scrolls recording all this, one in Bohairic and one in Arabic, and when he died they were laid in the ground beneath his body. Both documents have survived. By this date the northern Nubian throne had passed to a Muslim, royal power was breaking into small lordships, and the church that depended on that power was going with it. A Christian king named Joel and a bishop named Merki were still at Dotawo in 1484. Nobody knows exactly when the line ended, though it was probably not long after 1500. Scattered Christian villages on the Nile lasted into the eighteenth century without any clergy at all.