Pehlevi (Middle Persian) versus Greek and Egyptian (2)

Contemporary literary sources offer a little more material, but not much more. The richest testimony - admittedly not Egyptian but Palestinian - is the hagiographic record revolving around the figure of Saint Anastasius, a Persian soldier who became a monk in Palestine and was martyred by the Persians in 628. There are three Persian words in a passage recounting how Anastasius met martyrdom in Caesarea of Palestine(Vita et martyrium sancti Anastasii Persae, 17): besides σελλάριος, μαρζαβανᾶς, Persian marzbān, denoting the Persian governor in charge of frontier countries; and δερβᾶς, glossed as "the praetorium of the sellarios ", derived from Middle Persian dlp's /darbās/"palace". I proposed to identify it with the word ṭarāwus, which designates the Persian palace in Alexandria according to theHistory of the Patriarchs, written in Arabic, in a passage recounting the arrival of the Persians in Egypt and the capture of Alexandria. This is a second borrowing of Persian by the Greco-Egyptians during the conquest.

These two borrowings(sellarios and derbas) are confined to the institutional domain, precisely where the most superficial interferences occur and where we might expect conquered people to borrow from conquerors.
On the scale of various forms of multilingualism, the era of the Persian conquest thus offers the example of a degree zero (or almost). Conquerors and conquered seemed to coexist in separate worlds, with the latter, despite friction or conflict, continuing to live as before. Although the Persian conquest had virtually no linguistic or cultural impact, it nonetheless prepared the Egyptian population for another conquest fifteen years later, the consequences of which would irreversibly reshape Egypt's linguistic and cultural make-up.