Late antique Egypt witnessed a linguistic and cultural change of some magnitude: the institution, in Coptic, of a new, fully articulated system of writing the Egyptian language. While the seeds of this innovation had been sown in the early Roman period, they reached fruition only as Late Antiquity dawned. A range of factors contributed to cultural change in late antique Egypt, many of which can be traced elsewhere in the Roman world. In Egypt itself, however, the survival of papyri allows us to observe the interaction between the dominant and native cultures at close quarters.
‘‘Coptic’’ properly describes a stage in the writing of Egyptian; a stage in which the language was written in Greek characters, but with between six and eight additional letters derived from Demotic (the number depending on the dialect) for sounds not represented by the Greek alphabet. Freed from the confines of the deliberately archaizing Demotic script (and the conservative mentality that perpetuated it), and liberally including Greek loanwords, Coptic better represents contemporary spoken Egyptian.
During Late Antiquity, the Sahidic dialect of Coptic competed with a number of regional and so-called ‘‘vehicular’’ dialects - dialects that transcended a narrow locale - and emerged as the ‘‘classical’’ Coptic dialect (Kasser 1980-1; 1990). (Chief among the others were Bohairic, Fayumic, Mesokemic, Akhmimic, and Lycopolitan; see the respective entries in Atiya 1991, vol. viii.) Sahidic became both the primary literary dialect, and the pan-Egyptian vehicular dialect (a status its dialectal ancestor had probably acquired in the late Pharaonic and Persian periods: see Satzinger 1985), until superseded by Bohairic in the second millennium ad.
Late Antiquity in Egypt is often known, both academically and popularly, as the ‘‘Coptic period,’’ the period when ‘‘Coptic culture’’ dominated. The term is also applied beyond late antique limits. But that vague designation raises numerous problems of definition. Is ‘‘Coptic culture’’ coterminous with the use of the Coptic script, or of the Egyptian language? Is it Christian culture, as manifested in Egypt through the Egyptian (Coptic) church, or is it, as most loosely (but not
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
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Map 4 “Coptic’’ Egypt.
Uncommonly) applied, everything about Egypt from the late antique and early Byzantine periods? (See MacCoull 1993: ch. 1, 28-9; Clackson 2004.)
The words ‘‘Copt’’ and ‘‘Egyptian’’ are both linear descendants, through Arabic and Latin respectively, of the Greek Aigyptios. Applied by the Islamic rulers to the
Largely Christian inhabitants of Misr (as they called Egypt), Arabic qibt came to designate them both ethnically and religiously. Early Europeans travelers kept this meaning (‘‘a Christian inhabitant of Egypt’’) when they transliterated qibt as ‘‘Copt’’ (or its equivalents).
Just as every misry, however, was not a qibty at the time modern Europeans reached Egypt, so, when the armies of the Prophet swept into the Byzantine province, many of its population would never have identified themselves as Aigyptioi. Many of them, indeed, were ethnically non-Egyptian, although a long process of Greco-Romanization had promoted a new type of Egyptian, conditioned by centuries of influence - and pressure - to participate in Hellenic language and culture.
Hellen, in Greek as well as in Coptic Christian discourse, was developing distinctly pejorative associations in Late Antiquity (Vinzent 1998: 34-5; Haas 2004: 217-18); but Hellenic culture was not in eclipse, nor was Greek being displaced as the preeminent literary medium: throughout Late Antiquity, a knowledge of Greek was essential (in the east), if one wished to gain full access to the contemporary cultural milieu, especally the level of state government (Bagnall 1993: 99-109). Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized that late antique Egypt saw a revision, not a rejection, of Hellenism (Fowden 1986; Bowersock 1990; Frankfurter 2000).
Even in the social settings most contested in religious terms, Hellenic culture lived on in pilgrimage and philosophy (Remondon 1952; Wipszycka 1996: 63-105; Vinzent 1998). The sack of the Serapeum in ad 391 and the murder of Hypatia in AD 415 (Haas 1997: 161-3, 313-16) draw one’s eye, but not enough to distract from the continued promotion of older traditions in both Hellenic and native-speaking circles into the fifth century (Van der Vliet 1993; Frankfurter 1998b; Montserrat 1998). Yet, the question of the survival of Hellenism and Greek culture in Egypt should not be confused with the survival of ‘‘paganism’’: religion was only one component of Hellenic culture (Bowersock 1990: 1-13). In the sunset of Roman rule in Egypt, people continued both to copy Greek classics to attain literacy in Greek (Cribiore 1999: 283; 2001: 24) and to read and imitate Homer as a way of displaying their cultural attainments (see especially Dioscorus of Aphrodito: MacCoull 1988; Fournet 1999).
The rise of Coptic must be seen in the context of a bilingual milieu established during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Functional and more developed bilingualism is evident throughout that era (Fewster 2002; see Bagnall 1993: 230-60; Diele-man 2005: 104-10) and provides a backdrop to the expressly bilingual activity of the earliest users of literary Coptic, Christian and otherwise. Explicit documentary evidence for bilingualism before the sixth century is more difficult to find, since it is largely restricted to ‘‘formulaic bilingualism’’ - that is to say, when a scribe appends to a letter in Greek appropriate Coptic formulae of greeting or farewell, or vice versa (e. g., Grenfell and Hunt 1901: no. 145; Bell 1924: no. 1921; and many of the letters from Kellis in Gardner et al. 1999: especially no. 22).
So, the ‘‘Coptic period’’ (if we need use the term at all: see Clackson 2004: 39-41) is best thought of as referring not to an ethnic or religious group but to the culture carried by the Coptic script and language from the third century onward. And we have to think in terms of a bilingual milieu, in which late antique Greek and Egyptian speakers participated in the rise of both an Egyptian expression of later Hellenism and a new manifestation of native Egyptian culture.
World History
