60 6 0 3 Seventeenth-Century Kikongo Is Not the Ancestor of Present-Day Kikongo K o e n B o s to e n & G i l l e s - M au r i c e d e S c h ry v e r Introduction The KongoKing project (2012–16) approached the history of the Kongo kingdom along hitherto two rather uncommon strands, i.e. archae- ology and historical linguistics. While the project’s archaeologists unearthed the material heritage of several sites associated with the kingdom’s northernmost provincial capitals (e.g. Clist et al. 2015c; Clist et al. 2015d), the project’s linguists dedicated themselves, among other things, to the study of the kingdom’s linguistic legacy. Of the dozen or so works in Kikongo that were produced in the course of the seventeenth century, amongst others by Capuchins who started their Kongo mission in 1645 (Mukuna 1984: 73–6; Nsondé 1995: 14–18), only three survived the ravages of time: (1) the Doutrina Christãa, an interlinear Portuguese–Kikongo catechism from 1624 translated under the leadership of the Portuguese Jesuit Mateus Cardoso; (2) the Vocabularium Latinum, Hispanicum, e Congense, a trilingual wordlist which survived thanks to the 1652 manuscript copied by the Flemish Capuchin Joris Van Gheel; and (3) the Regulae quaedam pro diffcillimi Congensium idiomatis faciliori captu ad grammaticae normam redactae, a grammar of Kikongo published in 1659 under the authorship of the Italian Capuchin Hyacintho Brusciotto a Vetralla. These three extant seventeenth-century sources have an exceptional scientifc value. Not only do they provide us with invalu- able information on the language used by early Kongo Christians and European missionaries during the heyday of the kingdom, they are also the earliest (surviving) book-length sources ever written in a Bantu language (Doke 1935). Unsurprisingly, each of these sources was republished and translated in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Guinness 1882; Van Wing and Penders 1928; Bontinck and Ndembe Nsasi 1978), even if that did not always happen with due respect for the original source. The published version 9781108474184_pi-314.indd 60 24-Sep-18 6:00:05 PM