Babel on the Nile : multilingualism and multiculturalism in Late Antique Egypt (1)

Because of its burning relevance to modern society, and the impact this has necessarily had on the field of research, multilingualism is at the interface of societal concerns, methodological requirements and historical interest, making it an appropriate theme for the inauguration of the new "Written Culture and Byzantine Papyrology" chair. It is impossible to study ancient and medieval written sources without understanding the multilingual conditions that shaped them. In this respect, late antique Egypt is a privileged field, not only because of the papyrological documentation it has preserved (unlike the other provinces of the Empire, which were also multilingual), but also because of the historical conditions that profoundly altered its linguistic facies: egyptian, having abandoned its ancient scripts, acquired a new written medium, Coptic, which gradually undermined Greek's monopoly as the official language since the Ptolemies (seven centuries before the period under consideration); latin, which until then had been used mainly in the army, experienced a new vitality following Diocletian's administrative reforms; finally, the Sassanid occupation (619-629) and the Arab-Muslim conquest (642) introduced new languages, one of which, Arabic, was to become irreversibly established after ousting Greek and then Coptic. These three types of multilingual relations will be studied over three years (starting with the last) through the entire documentation (literary papyri, documentaries and literary sources transmitted by manuscript tradition) and according to several complementary approaches (historical, philological-linguistic, paleographic). The seminar will also present previously unpublished papyri related to this topic.