Babel on the Nile : multilingualism and multiculturalism in Late Antique Egypt (2)

This year's lectures continued the study of Egyptian multilingualism and multiculturalism in Late Antiquity begun last year. They were devoted to the complex relationship between Greek and Egyptian in Late Antiquity and the early medieval period (late ^{3rd-8thcentury} ), which will be further examined next year. This is the most interesting question relating to Egypt's multilingualism: how did the Greek language, imposed as a result of the Greco-Macedonian conquest (332 BC) and now the language of the administration, coexist over the long term with the Egyptian substratum, in other words, the language spoken by the population? The answer to this question has led us to untangle the threads of a dual process:

1. How and why did Egyptian culture, having renounced its ancient scripts (hieroglyphics, hieratic and demotic) and abandoned the religion of its ancestors, reinvent itself as a writer in a now Christianized world? Papyrological documentation enables us to follow the first experiments made by Egyptian speakers to record their language using the Greek alphabet, and to see how they gradually imposed themselves until they became a coherent and collectively accepted graphic system, Coptic.
   
2. How did Coptic coexist with the firmly established Greek in this process of slow emergence? Papyrological and literary sources show us at first hand how domains of competence emerged, in which each language exercised a kind of monopoly (a question that will be explored in greater depth next year).

But far from depicting a clear-cut, bipartite linguistic and cultural universe, with, on the one hand, Hellenic speakers, who would have constituted an urban population, cultivated and involved in administration and, on the other, Copt speakers populating the countryside, unable to write or speak Greek, far removed from the networks of power - a Manichean schema relayed by many syntheses! -However, the careful examination of papyrological sources has persuaded us that the emergence of Coptic and the first phase of its development owed much to Hellenism, to the point where it would not be an exaggeration to consider Coptic as an offshoot of Greek culture - a paradox that tells us a great deal about the complexity of acculturation phenomena in Late Antiquity.