Among Coptic documents from the fourth and fifth centuries, personal letters dominate, with some few household accounts and lists (Gardner et al. 1999: nos. 44-8; perhaps also Grenfell and Hunt 1901: no. 143 verso; Crum 1905: nos. 711, 1252; Hasltzka 2004: nos. 1035, 1037). That there are no dated Coptic texts in this period (the earliest that can be dated precisely come from ad 535/6: see MacCoull 1997; Richter 2002: 23-6; Worp 1990) illustrates well that Coptic was not used for any official or legally binding documentation until the sixth century. For most of Late Antiquity, vernacular Coptic remained a private tool.
The prominence of females in Coptic papyri, and of household concerns, reinforces that suggestion. Coptic seems to have particularly encouraged female written expression in Late Antiquity (Bagnall 2001; Cribiore 2001: 78). While the monastic archives are by their nature dominated by letters to men, the Kellis assemblage of forty-six Coptic texts includes four (and possibly five) letters composed by women, and no fewer than fourteen addressed to women. Female participation in the composition of at least some of the household accounts is also likely (Gardner et al. 1999: nos. 44-8; see also pp. 54-8, 253).
In this situation at least, women articulate their relationship with literacy primarily through Coptic. In Greek texts from the site, only one woman features as an addressee, and none as a letter-composer. When women write letters, they use Coptic, and their male relatives predominantly choose the native language when writing to them. This pattern is confirmed in letters dated later than the fourth century: while letters written by women in Greek decrease dramatically, their place is taken by compositions in Coptic, which women clearly preferred, once the option became available. Women took to the new script perhaps precisely because, in bilingual households throughout Greco-Roman Egypt, the native language dominated domestic life. The rise of Coptic merely allowed women to give written expression to this (so Bagnall 2001). More broadly, we may characterize a preference in some communities for conducting household and family communication in Coptic, extending into record-keeping in household industries where women were closely involved, such as the production of textiles.
Many have supposed that Coptic spread from educated areas in the valley to the hinterland and beyond. This supports the belief that literary usage came first, and that documentary usage was a consequence. Moreover, it is widely held that both were largely confined to a monastic setting in the early period. These well-rehearsed views provide a framework for wider considerations in those instances where new evidence and perspectives allow us to test those propositions further.
The attention to detail evident in the standardization of Coptic (among other factors) requires us to acknowledge that such standardization took place in an educated bilingual milieu (Bagnall 1993: 238, 253, 323). It was not a product of desert outposts or rural villages; rather, it was in the centers of literate culture (in particular the poleis) that decisive steps in translation and standardization were made. The papyrus record fails conspicuously, however, to confirm explicitly this interpretation of the rise of Coptic. Where we should see evidence for the use of Coptic in these large towns, few of the literary Coptic manuscripts can confidently be associated, through their find or purchase history, with an urban center, except for Pano-polis (Gascou 1989; on the Bodmer papyri see Robinson 1990; Bagnall 1993: 103-4, with bibliography). Many of the letters found at Kellis were sent from the Nile valley, one explicitly from Hermopolis (Gardner et al. 1999: no. 26), but this cannot camouflage the noticeable lack of Coptic documents from the towns themselves, from some of which (e. g., Hermopolis) relatively vast caches of late antique documents are extant. Despite the growth of a class of Hellenized Egyptians, some of whom must have been involved in the propagation of Coptic, none of the well-known late antique ‘‘urban’’ papyrus archives have identifiable Coptic sections (for the archives see Montevecchi 1988: 257-9; together with that of Ammon, Willis and Maresch 1998), nor can many other early Coptic documents be securely associated with an urban setting (Bagnall 1993: 257).
The lack of Coptic papyri from the Nile metropoleis does not invalidate the argument for early development in an educated urban milieu, but rather underlines that linguistic choices are determined more by context and recipient than by location and scribe (Bagnall 1995: 20-1, with bibliography). The dearth of urban Coptic papyri reflects in part the nature of most papyrus archives, which are substantially records of their collector’s relations with the state in one form or another, all necessarily conducted in Greek. At Kellis, this division between the public and private nature of the Greek documentation, as against the exclusively private nature of the Coptic texts, is noticeable (Clackson 2004: 38). Documentary use seems predominantly rural and village-based, but this may be a function of the addressees’ location in and, in the case of the monastic assemblages, alongside villages. Letters can be sent from anywhere, including from the nome capitals down the Nile, as the Kellis letters demonstrate. But the vernacular use of Coptic in Late Antiquity still operated only in contexts where the writer and addressee were part of a (sometimes widely geographically dispersed) community where the use of Coptic was expected and unsurprising. Within the towns, it would appear that the Greco-Egyptian elites who assisted the rise of Coptic still expected to receive letters - and largely wrote their own - in Greek.
A progression from literature to documents is problematized by the ‘‘Old Coptic ostracon,’’ which shows Coptic already in use for personal communications - at least among a restricted group of people - in the second half (or even the middle) of the third century. This piece may appear to exist in isolation, but formulaic continuities (see below) place it in a progression. Given the date of this text, however, we are not permitted to hold that this use of Coptic is necessarily a consequence of the earliest Christian Coptic texts, only just appearing in the valley and Fayum at this stage. It is still highly likely that literary texts (if non-Christian ritual texts may be included under this category) stand behind the rise of Coptic for letter-writing, but a direct relationship between this and the translation and distribution of the Coptic Bible seems too neat.
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