Saint Anne, in Christian tradition, is the mother of the Virgin Mary. In Nubia, she was especially venerated - invoked by women who hoped for children, who prayed for safe pregnancy, who asked her to protect the babies they had and the ones they hoped to have. The Nubian scholar B. Mierzejewska proposed that Nubian women prayed to Saint Anne because of the miraculous conception of her daughter, seeking her intercession for childbearing and maternal welfare. Anna and her husband Joachim were called Theopatores in the Eastern Christian tradition - God's ancestors. So this is who the Faras painter was depicting when Anne raised her finger. There are several ways to read that gesture. It may be a simple command: be silent. It may refer to what Ignatius of Antioch called "God's silence" - the mystery of Mary's conception, virginity, and the birth of the Messiah, three events too sacred for speech. Or it may relate to a prayer practice. In Egyptian and Palestinian monastic communities, some monks prayed silently while pressing the finger of their right hand to their lips, believing the gesture protected the worshipper from evil thoughts.

Faras Cathedral held its paintings the way a manuscript holds its drafts. Layers of plaster, layers of saints. The Saint Anne with her finger to her lips was painted directly on the first layer of wall plaster in the north nave. At some later point, it was covered over with a new layer bearing a portrait of Queen Martha - a Nubian royal, now forgotten but once important enough to displace a saint. There was also a second painting of Saint Anne in the same nave, on a later layer: this one showed Anne seated on a throne, with the baby Mary on her lap, possibly nursing. That second image was never finished or never fully preserved, but the surviving fragment is now in the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum. At the nearby church of Abdallah Nirki, yet another image of Saint Anne was found - this one showing her standing. Three images of Anne in a small stretch of the Nile valley. She mattered here.

The painting carries an inscription in Greek, which is how educated Nubian Christians wrote. Both vertical registers are damaged. The Polish scholar S. Jakobielski reconstructed what he could: Saint Anne, mother to the Mother of God. Saint and... The sentence breaks off. Jakobielski suggested two possible endings - Saint and Mary, or Saint and the Mother of Mary. One of the words is a monogram, a contraction of the kind used in Byzantine painting, shorthand among Christians who read the same scriptures in the same old languages. The inscription confirms what the iconography already says: Anne was understood here, at Faras, the way she was understood in Constantinople. Nubian Christianity was not isolated. It participated in a larger Christian world - while also inventing, on that one wall, a gesture that world never saw again.

In the 1960s, Lake Nasser began rising behind the new Aswan High Dam, and Faras Cathedral - along with everything else in Lower Nubia - was going under. UNESCO coordinated a massive rescue campaign. A Polish archaeological team working at Faras peeled paintings off the cathedral walls, cut them from their plaster beds, stabilized them, and shipped them out. Many now live in the Faras Gallery of the National Museum in Warsaw. Others, like the fragment of Anne with baby Mary, stayed in Khartoum. The Saint Anne with her finger to her lips was one of the works saved. She left Nubia. The cathedral did not. Somewhere beneath the flat still water of Lake Nasser, the rest of the north nave is silent - the way Anne had been asking, all along, for it to be.