As regards media, one characteristic is so obvious that it hardly deserves mention. It is that Coptic is handwritten and not printed. The creation of Coptic literature antedates in its entirety the arrival of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The Coptic alphabet was for the first time printed with moveable type in the early seventeenth century (Emmel 1986). Two other characteristics of the material vehicle pertain to the time when Coptic literature was being produced and, therefore, deserve more discussion. They are its writing media and its format (Roberts 1983). As for media, Coptic literature is written on papyrus, parchment, or paper. Pre-Coptic Egyptian literature had been typically written on papyrus. In terms of format, Coptic literary works are in codex form. By contrast, when written with a pen instead of chiselled or painted, pre-Coptic literature had been typically inscribed on papyrus rolls tied with a string.
Writing materials: papyrus, parchment, paper Coptic literature belongs to the era following the time when papyrus was typically used (except in ancient Mesopotamia, where clay was the rule) and preceding the near monopoly of paper that came with the invention of printing. This era lasted from about the second century bc to about the fifteenth century ad. In it papyrus, parchment, and paper were all three used; in fact, in the late first millennium ad, all three were employed simultaneously to write Coptic. Over the centuries, parchment gradually replaced papyrus and paper gradually replaced parchment, but there was an overlap.
Papyrus is plant material. The sheets are made of the pith of the papyrus plant. Before the advent of Coptic virtually all the literature of Egypt had been written on papyrus from time immemorial. Egypt also possessed a monopoly on the manufacture of papyrus and exported it to all corners of the world. Many of the oldest preserved books containing Coptic literature are made of papyrus. Around the fifth to sixth century ad parchment largely supplanted papyrus after having been used alongside it. Papyrus remained in use for writing letters and business documents, but production of papyrus ceased in about the twelfth century.
Parchment is an animal material. It is animal skin stretched on a frame and dried in that state. The process is irreversible. Adding moisture to parchment does not return it to animal skin. Leather is also made from animal skin, but by a different process, tanning. Parchment became more widely used in the ancient world from the second century bc onward, after having been invented some time earlier. Some of the oldest codices containing Coptic literature are of parchment, but papyrus was still used alongside parchment in the fifth to sixth centuries. (Manuscripts are often difficult to date to a specific century, let alone to a specific decade.) As a vehicle for literary works, papyrus is, therefore, attested later in Egypt than elsewhere in the ancient world. Perhaps Egypt’s uniquely dry climate exceptionally preserved papyrus books whereas humid climates elsewhere caused them to perish. If papyrus was in fact used longer in Egypt than elsewhere, Egypt’s monopoly in the papyrus trade may have contributed to this situation.
Coptic literature is first written on paper from about the tenth century. Since the use of papyrus was almost extinct at the time, the name ‘‘papyrus’’ could be transferred to the new material without causing confusion. The skill of paper-making was probably imported from China to the Middle East in the eighth century. Like papyrus and unlike parchment, paper is a plant material. Sheets of paper are manufactured by dipping a grid of wires bordered by wood into a vat of rotting rags turned into liquid pulp and allowing the film of pulp sticking to the frame to dry. Iconic wire figures attached to the wire grid may leave water-marks indicating the paper’s provenance or manufacturer. Paper made from wood-pulp dates to modern times and becomes common only in the late nineteenth century.
The transition from parchment to paper in the tenth century coincided roughly with the decline of Coptic as a spoken language. As long as Coptic was spoken, Sahidic was the dialect used in most writings. More than 90% of surviving literary works in Coptic are in this dialect, but, when Coptic died out, Bohairic and not Sahidic was chosen as the liturgical language of the Coptic church, and Sahidic fell into complete disuse as a literary dialect. The other literary dialects had become extinct earlier, most by about the fifth century, with Faiyumic resisting Sahidic supremacy longer, mainly till the eighth century. Accordingly, Coptic literature survives in great part in either one of two manifestations: parchment codices containing Sahidic texts and paper codices containing Bohairic texts. Codices containing texts in other dialects are earlier and, therefore, made of either papyrus or parchment.
The most prominent of those other dialects are Akhmimic, Faiyumic, Lykopolitan (or Subakhmimic), and Middle Egyptian (Oxyrhynchitic).
Since papyrus deteriorates faster over time than parchment and since papyrus manuscripts are also generally several centuries older than paper manuscripts, Coptic literary texts written on papyrus are, as a rule, more fragmentary than those inscribed on parchment, a fact which makes interpreting them more difficult.
There is one more writing vehicle on which many, usually short, Coptic texts are inscribed, namely the ostracon. Ostraca quite often date to the sixth to eighth centuries, but the texts in question are typically documentary in nature, not literary. In the documentary realm, Coptic texts on ostraca were replaced on a large scale by Arabic texts on paper. ‘‘Ostrakon’’ is Greek for ‘‘potsherd,’’ but denotes two types of sherds that are both often used for short documentary texts, namely sherds of broken pots or jars and stone-sherds, mostly of limestone of suitable shape.
Format: the codex
In the history of books and writing the rise of Coptic literature around the late third and fourth century coincides with the rise of the codex, which replaced the roll. Consequently, Coptic literature is almost entirely preserved in codices. The shape of the book that is now taken for granted, with sheets bound together at the spine, did not exist from the beginning of writing 5000 years ago. The format came into existence about two thousand years ago around the beginning of the modern era. The term ‘‘codex’’ denotes manuscripts exhibiting this format. The earliest fragments of codices date to the second century ad, and the earliest representation of a codex is found in a painting dating to the third century found in a Roman catacomb. Christian communities almost immediately adopted the new format to the exclusion of the roll. Meanwhile, classical authors kept being copied onto papyrus rolls in Alexandria in Egypt and other centers of learning. The rise of Christianity in the fourth century coincided with the near universal adoption of the codex format.
Codices consist of quires, large sheets folded into smaller ones and cut open except at the spine. Each large sheet produces a quire. The norm in Coptic codices is quires constructed from folding a sheet three times, with eight smaller sheets or 16 pages as the result. A few of the very earliest codices, including the famed Nag Hammadi codices containing Coptic Gnostic texts, consist of sheets folded just once, with four pages as the result, and all tucked into one another. Strictly, the result is not a single quire but a large number of four-page quires all folded into one another. Among the earliest codices, wooden covers are not uncommon. Leather covers with insides consisting of papyrus or parchment debris soon became the norm.
Format: the world’s oldest books and bindings It is rarely made explicit that Coptic literature stands out among all the world’s literatures much more for certain external characteristics than for the characteristics of its contents. Other Christian Oriental literatures such as those of the Syriac, Armenian, and Ethiopic churches are similar to Coptic literature in content. In addition, Coptic literature is generally popular in nature and lacks any sophistication and complexity that could render it distinctive among literatures. But when it comes to external characteristics, Coptic literature stands out by serving as the content of many of the world’s oldest books in codex format. A confluence of circumstances has produced this property of Coptic literature. The first is that Coptic literature is Christian and was, therefore, much less likely to be discarded and cease being copied than classical authors, who were often rejected for their pagan subject matter. The second is that the codex came into existence and rose to prominence at the same time as Christianity. The third is that Christian communities appear to have adopted the codex format quickly instead of showing hesitation like the pagan communities, possibly as the result of a desire to make the new format into a symbol of the newness of the Christian message. The fourth is the dry climate involving zero rainfall prevailing in much of Egypt. By comparison, the oldest Christian Syriac codex, which bears a colophon dated to 411, is made from parchment. If papyrus codices written in Syriac had ever existed, they would have perished.
It might be added that many of the earliest book-bindings are also Coptic, including those of the large number of parchment codices unearthed in 1910 on the site of the ancient Monastery of St Michael located in the desert about three miles from the village of el-Hamuli in the Fayum region and preserved at the Pierpont Morgan Library in downtown Manhattan in New York City (Depuydt 1993a). These codices constitute the largest single trove of Coptic literary works ever to reach modern libraries as a single whole. The earliest history of book-binding coincides with the earliest history of Coptic book-binding. The bindings on other early books have, as a rule, been replaced at a later date.
World History
