Coptic develops at the intersection of a number of cultural and linguistic axes: Christian and non-Christian, provincial and imperial, Greek and Egyptian, town and country, literary and documentary. A new culture arises along with the new script, but are we watching the creation of an alternative culture, or a new cultural fusion? To what degree was the rise of Coptic the product of a Christian milieu, and to what degree did it contribute to the rise of a native culture rival to that promoted at large within the Roman Empire?
Script, language, text, and text production form the primary witness to the continuities and contrasts that mark the rise of this culture. Contact between the syncretic ritual texts and the oldest Christian Coptic documents is evident at an orthographic, alphabetic, and dialectal level, particularly in the third century Bodmer manuscript of Proverbs (Kasser 1960; 1991a; 2004; on the dialect see Johnson 1976; Satzinger 1984). Yet, the language itself is closer to ‘‘Christian’’ Coptic than to ‘‘old Coptic’’ (Emmel 1992: 183).
Evolving Coptic scribal conventions reinforce the latter connection, and are closely linked with Christian scribal practice and modes of textual production. The latter is most noticeably characterized, from the earliest witnesses on, by an overwhelming preference for the codex format for texts on papyrus or parchment, and the practice of contracting important words (Lord, God, Jesus, Christ, etc.; see also Turner 1977; Roberts 1979: 26-48). Both of these practices almost immediately became standard for Coptic texts: virtually no Coptic texts are preserved on papyrus rolls, as used for previous Egyptian texts, and overwhelmingly for Greco-Roman literary texts (Kahle 1954, i: 275-7). Nomina sacra, as the abbreviated ‘‘sacred names’’ are known, appear already in early fourth-century Coptic texts, and are subsequently found in the Manichaean texts, many of the Nag Hammadi tractates, and Coptic magical texts.
At the level of epistolary formulae, however, other trajectories are visible. Coptic letters from the fourth and fifth centuries routinely begin with a characteristic ‘‘A is it who writes to B’’ cleft-sentence construction (so in the papyri, and always in She-noute; see Biedenkopf-Ziehner 1983: 42-3). This is grammatically dissimilar to the way the Pauline and Catholic epistles are translated into Coptic; a trail does seem visible, however, back to the Kellis Old Coptic ostracon, and to the latest Demotic letters in the third century ad (Tait 1977: no. 22, with pp. 76 ff.). The latter are the compositions of Egyptian priests, and the Kellis ostracon dates from the period before we have firm evidence that the New Testament existed in Coptic translation. Below the level of sacred text, then, are the continuities of daily life.
The Egyptian priestly milieu presents itself at times as ambivalent or hostile toward Greek (whatever the realities; see Dieleman 2005: 1-10, 143-4). In a different way, the script of early Coptic documents yields an apparent agenda of differentiation from Greek. Many Coptic scribes in the fourth century eschewed the standard cursive scripts used for Greek documents, and persisted in writing Coptic documents in a type of handwriting more appropriate to a literary production (i. e., a ‘‘bookhand’’; see MacCoull 1997). Where the same scribe writes Greek and Coptic side by side, a clear and conscious differentiation has been made (see, e. g., Grenfell and Hunt 1901: no. 145; see also Van Minnen 1995: 16). Even into the sixth and seventh centuries, some bilingual notaries, such as Paul, son of Megalos from the village This, used subtly different (although clearly related) styles of writing for Greek and Coptic. Dioscorus of Aphrodito himself employed one hand for Greek literary and Coptic documentary texts, and (on the whole) another, more cursive, hand for Greek documents (MacCoull 1995, 1997; on Dioscorus’ literary output see now Fournet 1999). In the early period, this suggests a general acculturation to the milieu of copying literary texts, rather than a rejection of a ‘‘Greek’’ style of writing. But such did not function everywhere: at Kellis, a highly scribal community, Greek and Coptic documentary texts are frequently written in similar styles of hand (Gardner and Choat 2004). Evolution along pluralistic lines is again apparent.
Coptic reflects its proximity to the Egyptian vernacular in its wholesale adoption of Greek words; these would have been common in spoken Egyptian, but are infrequent in Demotic texts (Clarysse 1987; on ritual texts see Dieleman 2005: 110-20). But such tendencies do not always have to be seen as a clear delineation, a conscious setting off and restart; they may rather reflect pragmatic choices, and a desire to replicate the accessible and familiar koine of the Greek Bible.
It is clear that a wider milieu than the Christian one was involved in the development and rise of Coptic. If it could not have spread without the Christian - and later monastic - impetus, vital groundwork had been laid by the wider Greco-Egyptian tradition, in particular the educated bilingual (and in particular biscribal) elements concentrated in the Egyptian priesthood. It need not necessarily be assumed that Christians were actively and successfully converting priests, but rather that in the third century they came to compete with the Egyptian priesthood for recruits among a certain section of society, the educated and bilingual Hellenized Egyptian elite. If exact historical circumstances are - perhaps deliberately - not recorded, the manuscripts themselves testify that the orbits of the Egyptian priesthood and Christianity intersected, allowing the transfer of ideas, techniques, and scripts.
That the rise of Coptic had a ‘‘nationalistic’’ element (Hopkins 1991: 146-7; MacMullen 1964a: 194-5) is difficult to prove, and alignment with the agendas of contemporary Christian schismatics and secular revolutionaries is hazardous (Wips-zycka 1996: 9-61). It is tempting to seek empire-wide tendencies in the rise of provincial languages such as Coptic, Syriac, and the local languages of North Africa (e. g., MacMullen 1966). Outside the Near East, late antique evidence usually comes in the reports of onlookers who spoke (and wrote) Latin (on encounters between Latin and Punic see Brown 1968b; Adams 2003: 200-45). Only in Syria is the phenomenon sufficiently ‘‘literary’’ to allow the relationship with the hegemonic tongue (in that case Greek) to be tested.
In Egypt, the identification between expression in Coptic and an anti-imperial agenda belongs to the post-Chalcedonic period and is not fully manifested until the sixth century (Orlandi 1991: 1454-5). Schism and rebellion had their own, often quite specific, aims that frequently had little, if anything, to do with ‘‘Egyptian nationalism.’’ Nor should Coptic be seen in the light of the latter. In its origins it was a diverse phenomenon, without an obvious center of gravity. The dialectal distribution of the early Christian manuscripts yields no natural geographic epicenter (Funk 1988; see also Kasser 1991b); nor is the preponderance of Sahidic necessarily an indication of a central program, but rather a testament to its dialectal neutrality and its preexisting vehicular status, particularly among the educated classes (Kahle 1954, i: 242-68; Satzinger 1985).
Center of the church in Egypt, home to Hellenized yet highly traditional Egyptians (Frankfurter 2000), and perhaps even the birthplace of the Sahidic dialect (Kahle 1954, i: 256-7; a more nuanced proposal in Satzinger 1985), Alexandria suggests itself as an appropriate melting pot in which transference of traditions and mutual interaction may have occurred. However, the climate of Egypt’s Delta has robbed us of papyri with which we might test what role the inhabitants of the great metropolis played in the rise of Coptic. While some extrapolations, made in the face of that dearth of material, are thought-provoking (see esp. McBride 1989), it should be noted that, while much can be said about Athanasius’ union of Alexandrian ecclesi-asticism and Upper Egyptian monasticism, evidence of the direct involvement of the archiepiscopal see in the rise of Coptic is scant, and there is no evidence (contra Lefort 1933) that Athanasius himself ever wrote or preached in Egyptian. The sheer dialectal diversity, and the early production of translations of texts of which Alexandrian theology would not necessarily have approved (see Orlandi 1991: 1451; 1998: 125-9), also indicates multiple emphases.
Coptic developed into a cultural revival, but it is difficult to discern such an intention among those who promoted it in the third and fourth centuries. Christians and like groups wished to provide texts for new converts; the Egyptian priests were clarifying and synthesizing their invocations. It was a cultural revival that revived not the millennia-old traditions of Egypt, but the written Egyptian word itself. Significantly, it did not perpetuate the ‘‘closed’’ nature of every previous Egyptian script: no guild had to be joined, no special social class born into: one had only to be able to read Greek and some few other characters. If this was a small portion of society, it was far higher than the portion of people who knew earlier Egyptian scripts in the Greco-Roman period.
Rather than a newly expressed cultural divide, the rise of Coptic enabled a linguistic fusion to match the cultural fusion that was late Roman Egypt. ‘‘Coptic culture’’ was not a separate entity to the dominant Mediterranean culture, which grew alongside and came to dominate Hellenic culture. Rather, it was a broad-based creation by the Greco-Egyptian culture that the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian worlds had bequeathed to Egypt. If Christians came to dominate the use of Coptic, it was largely because Christianity won a much wider battle, narrated elsewhere in this volume.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A synthetic overview of the period is provided by Bagnall 1993, to which one should now add Bowman 1996 and Krause 1998. On Greek papyri, see Turner 1980, Montevecchi 1988, and Rupprecht 1994; on Coptic papyrology, Pernigotti 1995, Clackson 2004, and MacCoull 1995, 1997. Plenary reports to successive congresses of the International Association of Coptic Studies give up-to-date reviews of progress in Coptic studies (most recently, Immerzeel and Van der Vliet 2004; see also Emmel et al. 1999). On the Greco-Egyptian ritual texts (‘‘magical papyri’’), see Brashear 1995, Ritner 1995, and Dieleman 2005. The Greek and ‘‘old Coptic’’ texts are published in Preisendanz 1973-4; the Demotic more haphazardly (bibliography consolidated in Dieleman 2005). All are translated in Betz 1986 and Meyer et al. 1994.
Their historical and linguistic context is treated in Dieleman 2005, and the evolution of the Egyptian priesthood in Late Antiquity by Frankfurter 1998b. For Christianity in Egypt and the papyrological evidence in particular, see Wipszycka 1996, 1998, 2001; for catalogues of Coptic biblical papyri, Schussler 1995- (see also Schmitz and Mink 1986-). Bibliography on the Nag Hammadi codices is collected in Scholer 1971 and 1997. On Manichaean texts, see Gardner and Lieu 2004: 35-45. Many remain unpublished: for recent progress, see the reports of R. van den Broeck and W.-P. Funk in Immerzeel and Van der Vliet 2004 and Emmel et al. 1999. Short treatments covering all aspects of Coptic language, literature, and history can be found in Atiya 1991 (see especially the specialized treatments of language and dialect in vol. viii), and many Coptic subjects are usefully treated in Helck and Westendorf 1975-92, especially vol. iii (1980). Orlandi (1986, 1991, 1998) provides in several places synthetic introductions to Coptic literature. A useful brief survey of Coptic is Emmel 1992; for a broader perspective, see Loprieno 1995. The classification of Coptic dialects is best treated by Funk (esp. 1988) and Kasser (1980-1; 1990). Education in Greco-Roman Egypt is fundamentally treated in Cribiore 2001 (see also 1999); see Biedenkopf-Ziehner 1999 for the earlier and later periods. Greek and bilingual exercises on papyrus are listed and discussed in Cribiore 1996; Coptic exercises in Hasitzka 1990. On Shenoute and his literary corpus, see now Emmel 2004, which is, despite its stated aims, much more than a codicological study.
World History
