The linguistic vehicle does much to define the identity of Coptic literature. There are three key characteristics: the extensive use of Greek words in Coptic texts, the preservation of Coptic literature in several dialects, and the relevance of Coptic to the study of earlier Egyptian.
Greek words
Substantial Greek immigration into Egypt began in the seventh century BC, the first waves consisting of mercenaries and merchants. With Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BC the Greek component of Egyptian civilization became significantly more prominent. Greek was now truly an Egyptian language. The use of Greek was concentrated in the royal court and the upper classes, who typically dwelt in the cities and towns of Egypt. Greek also became the vehicle for many of the more sophisticated usages of language, including scientific and theological discussion, and it remained the language of the elite down to the arrival of Islam in the seventh century. Texts written in Demotic and later in Coptic were mostly not addressed to the elite but to the common man, and their diction and contents are of the popular kind.
Since Greek and Egyptian were spoken alongside one another, mutual influence was unavoidable. A number of Greek words must have entered Demotic and later Coptic by virtue of the mere coexistence of two languages in a single space. Greek words may also on occasion have been adopted in Coptic to lend a veneer of finesse to one’s language, as one would in English by using French terms such as de rigueur and a la mode. Furthermore, contact and commerce with foreign nations made Egyptians familiar with objects for which no Egyptian word existed, leading to the adoption of still more Greek words, e. g. Greek khion is used to denote ‘‘snow’’ in Coptic. However, there was yet another factor that caused a flood of Greek words to enter Coptic. Greek played a crucial role in the creation of the Coptic literary idiom. Coptic was at first developed to translate Greek texts, above all the New Testament and the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint, and the creators of the idiom were fluent in Greek. Like Coptic, Demotic must to a certain extent have been an artificial idiom, but, in contrast with Coptic, Demotic was not created by speakers of Greek in order to translate Greek texts. Therefore, Greek words in Demotic are comparatively rare.
As Greek was translated into Coptic, Greek words were retained for various reasons, among them apparently the following two. First, translators may often have felt unsure as to how to render Greek words conveying delicate nuances, which involve abstract notions. They, therefore, simply retained the Greek word. Second, many concepts of Jewish and Christian thought came to be designated by technical terms in Greek. As technical terms, they were retained in Coptic, e. g. Greek angelos, ‘‘angel,’’ anastasis, ‘‘resurrection,’’ andpneuma, ‘‘spirit.’’ As for grammatical properties such as declension and conjugation, Greek words are given in the nominative case and verbs in a form identical to the imperative. But let there be no mistake. The overall grammatical structure of Coptic is Egyptian and not Greek, even if there is occasional influence from Greek sentence structure on that of Coptic. The number of Greek words differs from dialect to dialect. The Sahidic dialect has many more than Bohairic, but it is not clear whether this difference stems from a desire on the part of Bohairic translators for a purer Egyptian idiom.
Three additional observations on the role of Greek words in Coptic literature may be made. First, there were probably many more Greek words in written than in spoken Coptic. The written language was created by Greek speakers to translate Greek, but the spoken language was not. Second, whereas one might expect to find more Greek words in Coptic translations from Greek than in original compositions in Coptic, Lefort (1950) observed that, if anything, the opposite seems to be the case. One would expect the writings of the great promoter of monasticism Pachomius, dating to the early fourth century, to be original compositions in Coptic. Yet, they contain 25% more Greek words than translations of the Greek text of the Bible. And third, one should add immediately that, remarkably, even careful linguistic examination does not allow differentiation between translation Coptic and original Coptic.
Dialects
The fact that Coptic literature is preserved in several dialects (Worrell 1934; Kahle 1954; Polotsky 1970; Funk 1988; Kasser and Funk 1990; Kasser 2006) stands in sharp contrast with the literatures of other Christian Oriental communities such as the Armenian, Ethiopian, Georgian, and Syriac churches, which are conveyed by a single dialectic idiom. The reason for the contrast is not known. Presumably, the coexistence of several literary dialects in Egypt corresponded to a certain need. The most obvious need is that the Coptic dialects in question could not be understood outside of their geographical boundaries. It is difficult to quantify the differences between the Coptic dialects. The differences are significantly smaller than, say, between members of the Romance language group such as French, Italian, and Spanish. At least for modern students of Coptic, if one has attained fluency in one Coptic dialect, fluency in the others should come soon and easily. In studying the dialects of Coptic the student is, therefore, advised to begin by studying one dialect really well, typically Sahidic, and only then make the transition to other dialects. One suspects that there were also dialects in Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Syriac diverging to a similar degree to Coptic dialects. One can only speculate that, in those other churches, a strong central authority was able to impose a single dialect as literary idiom on speakers of many different dialects. By the same token, no such authority presumably existed in Egypt. In any event, Egyptian intellectuals expended considerable energy in creating not just one but several Coptic literary idioms all at the same time.
Even if no dialect achieved a monopoly in Egypt, the Sahidic dialect was by far the favored idiom until the time when Coptic strongly declined at the end of the first millennium. By the sixth century, only the Faiyumic dialect was still used as a literary idiom alongside Sahidic. When Coptic died out as a spoken language, Coptic church authorities did assign a monopoly position to a single dialect, but, as already noted, it was not the Sahidic dialect that was selected but Bohairic. More than 90% of what has survived of manuscripts written up to that time is in Sahidic. Hardly any surviving Bohairic texts date before the ninth century, but early texts have come to light, especially Papyrus Bodmer III kept at the Martin Bodmer Library in Geneva (Kasser 1971), proving that Bohairic had already been a literary idiom early on.
The Coptic dialects came to light gradually in modern times. By around 1800, three Coptic dialects were known in the West, namely Sahidic, Bohairic, and Faiyumic. Between about 1880 and about 1920, two more dialects were added, namely Akhmimic and Subakhmimic or Lykopolitan. Meanwhile, additional texts have emerged, and detailed studies of the dialects have led to ever finer distinctions. The result is that, by some counts, about fifteen dialects clustering in perhaps seven or eight groups have been documented in the surviving manuscripts. The most remarkable event in the modern study of Coptic dialects was the emergence, in the second half of the twentieth century, of a previously entirely unknown dialect that has been called Middle Egyptian or Oxyrhynchitic, ‘‘Middle’’ in ‘‘Middle Egyptian’’ being a geographical term. By contrast, when ‘‘Middle Egyptian’’ denotes a stage of Hieroglyphic Egyptian, ‘‘Middle’’ is chronological, denoting a stage of the language following Hieroglyphic Old Egyptian and preceding Hieroglyphic Late Egyptian. The Middle Egyptian dialect of Coptic is represented by fine early parchment manuscripts such as the Princeton University Library’s Codex Scheide containing the Gospel of Matthew, the Pierpont Morgan Library’s Codex Glazier containing about half of the Acts of the Apostles, and the Psalm Codex now kept at the Coptic Museum in Cairo. The Codex Scheide and the Codex Glazier are both exceptionally well preserved. The Psalm Codex was found in November 1984 under the head of a girl buried in a cemetery at el-Mudil not far from ancient Oxyrhynchos about one hundred miles south of Cairo. Its provenance confirmed what scholars had earlier conjectured about the home of the Middle Egyptian dialect of Coptic. In being of known provenance, the el-Mudil codex is the exception among manuscripts written in Middle Egyptian. In studying the relations between the dialects, knowledge of place of origin of manuscripts and of their date is crucial, but such knowledge is very often wanting, and the provenance of manuscripts reaching libraries in the West is frequently unknown. It is also often difficult to date manuscripts more precisely on the basis of paleographical characteristics. The earliest colophons containing dates are from the early ninth century. As a result, opinions about the home locations of Coptic dialects have diverged widely.
The most prominent and most vexed question in the study of Coptic dialects has always been the home of Sahidic (Polotsky 1970: 559-61). If we judge by its name only, the matter would seem to be simple. The Arabic name Sahidic means ‘‘pertaining to Upper (that is, Southern) Egypt.’’ By contrast, the Arabic name of the dialect that became the official language of the Coptic church, Bohairic, means ‘‘pertaining to Lower (that is, Northern) Egypt,’’ more precisely ‘‘pertaining to the region near the (Mediterranean) sea’’ (from Arabic bahr, ‘‘sea’’). No one has ever doubted that Bohairic is the dialect of northern Egypt, especially the Nile Delta. Furthermore, the name Sahidic is part of an old tradition. What could be easier than to conclude that Sahidic was the language of the south just as Bohairic is the language of the north? Furthermore, just as Memphis had for centuries been the political and cultural center of the north, so had Thebes been that of the south. The region of Thebes consequently presented itself as a natural choice as the home of the Sahidic dialect. From Thebes Sahidic would have gradually spread to become the literary language of all of Egypt. The single most important fact that seems to undermine this obvious hypothesis is that Sahidic shares certain striking characteristics with Bohairic. Sahidic and Bohairic share the vowels a and o where other dialects exhibit e and a. As a result, the presumed home of Sahidic gradually shifted northward ever closer to Bohairic in the north. Kahle (1954: 257 n. 1) even proposed Alexandria as the base of Sahidic, but with hesitation.
Then everything changed when a manuscript of Proverbs emerged that, in addition to having many traits in common with the dialects of the south such as Akhmimic and Subakhmimic, also exhibited the vowels a and o (Kasser 1960). The dialect is known as P. Dialect P is in many ways strikingly similar to documentary texts of later date whose provenance is no doubt Thebes (Nagel 1965). P is also in other ways unique. It exhibits unique additional letters and other features that are not part of the orthography of any other dialect of Coptic. Accordingly, the supposed home of Sahidic can safely be returned to southern Egypt. The question remains what the vowels a and o are doing in the south if all dialects south of the Delta exhibit e and a. It has been suggested that the vowels were adopted from the dialect of Memphis, which did exhibit those vowels, owing to the prestige of the latter dialect (Satzinger 1985).
Coptic and Egyptian
The strongest link between Coptic and pre-Coptic Egypt is the fact that the Coptic language is the vehicle of Coptic literature. Coptic is by far the best-known stage of the Egyptian language. It is ‘‘the only phase of Egyptian of which it is possible to obtain as precise and comprehensive a knowledge as can reasonably be expected where a dead language is concerned’’ (Polotsky 1970: 558). It is the only stage in which one can come close to obtaining a true feel for the Egyptian language. In that sense, the study of Coptic indirectly advances the study of pre-Coptic Egyptian and Egypt.
World History
