Old Nubian is not a language you study for its literature. Most of what’s written in it is translated from works that have survived in Greek or Coptic, which is how they cracked ON in the first place. The rest is epigraphy, which people have a hard time reading anyway, since its lexicon differs from what’s preserved in the literary texts. That leaves ON as a kind of historical curio, a written language on the margins of marquee language areas like Egyptian and Ethiopic which nonetheless testifies to the presence of an indigenous written culture in the Sudan during the Middle Ages.
The miracle of St. Menas is an exception to the rule. It’s probably based on a Coptic original, but that original has been lost, so the ON version is what we have to work with. It’s the simple story of a woman who, along with all the livestock on her farm, has become infertile. A pagan, she nonetheless thinks it’s worth a try to dedicate something at the nearby Christian Church of St. Menas, just to see if that might help. She sends an egg with a boatsman, who forgets about it until several days later, when he finds it and tells his son to cook it so he can eat it. Next Sunday at church, St. Menas appears in glory and kicks the boatsman in the head so hard that he gives birth to a live hen. Back at the farm, the woman and all her livestock start giving birth, so everyone converts to Christianity.
That’s a truly low-stakes miracle, to say the least. It testifies, at some remove, to the religious syncretism of an Egypt whose transition to Christianity was so swift that we otherwise barely catch a glimpse of the intermediate phases. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Roman Empire, there was a time at which Christianity could appear as but one of many sources of spiritual solutions to material problems. Does the story of St. Menas tell us anything about what made it so appealing? Perhaps not, but it does reveal something about the conditions from which Egyptians of that period might have been seeking spiritual release. The lady protagonist, a peasant, gets taken advantage of at every turn; without the intervention of St. Menas, her offering to the church will have been lost. We know that the fellahin really were dependent on intermediaries in this respect as in others (e.g. scribes, for producing legal documents), especially if they happened to be women. That’s the affliction to which St. Menas promises relief. It’s good advertising, whether or not Christianity actually protected Egyptian peasants from the intermediaries on whom they depended for their interactions with the outside world.