Babel on the Nile (2) : multilingualism and multiculturalism in Late Antique Egypt (3)

Listen to audio

Our examination of Old Coptic texts has led us to focus on the sociology of their readers and/or writers, with the aim of defining the functions of this script and identifying not only the factors that contributed to its development, but also the palaeographic, textual and contextual characteristics that distinguish it from Coptic proper.

The profile of the writers and readers of Old Coptic texts, unlike that of the more motley users of pre-Old Coptic, is clear and homogeneous, pointing us towards the milieu of Egyptian temples or, with the later magical texts, circles connected with temples or traditional Egyptian religion. The function of the Old Copt in these texts is generally to help vocalize Egyptian, a function all the more important as the correct pronunciation of these formulas is essential for their performativity. In addition to the lack of vocalization specific to Egyptian script, the growing gap between the spoken language and the orthography of hieratic and demotic scripts was becoming increasingly acute. To this end, the priests developed a transliteration system based on the letters of the Greek alphabet, supplemented by signs noting sounds unknown to Greek and derived from Demotic. These signs are striking for their resemblance to those that would be definitively adopted by Coptic proper, and for the relative homogeneity of texts from regions as different as Fayoum, Oxyrhynchos and Thebes, despite a few formal differences. Since this system can already be seen in its entirety in theOld Coptic Horoscope from the very end of the ^1stcentury, this means that it had already been canonized, so to speak, at this time, and distributed to temples throughout the country.

This adoption of the Greek alphabet in the Egyptian milieu has been the subject of various interpretations. What is certain, however, is that the use of a new Greek-based script within the very rigid and traditionalist framework of Egyptian temples is the sign of a profound cultural mutation, insofar as the conservative and formalist circles of priests were willing to give up the exclusivity of the old graphic system and open up to another system, greek, which had the privilege of being the language of the state and the advantage of being alphabetic (like most of the Empire's scripts) and of marking vowels. The fact that, after centuries of ritual practice based exclusively on hieratic texts, the need was felt to resort to a foreign graphic system in order to vocalize formulas correctly, points to a form, if not of deculturation, at least of cultural paradigm shift.

But despite its openness to Greek and its culture, Old Coptic has a fundamental characteristic that nuances this relationship to Hellenism and radically distinguishes it from Coptic: the absence of Greek words. In fact, Old-Coptic is only scripturally Hellenized, while Coptic derives part of its substance from Hellenism. One has a purely instrumental relationship with Greek; the other owes much of its genius to it. It's time to turn our attention to this "other".

The first Coptic texts

The emergence of Coptic itself is a delicate question, and the first decades of its existence are poorly documented. Its earliest written testimonies, which require careful examination, generally take the form of glosses or translations with reference to an early Greek text. The earliest papyrus is a Greek copy of the Book of Isaiah with Coptic glosses(P. Chester Beatty VII + P. Merton I 2 + PSI XII 1273), probably dating from the late 3rd or early 4th^century. Close examination of these glosses has enabled us to hypothesize about their functions, and thus to identify the profile of their author, a good Hellenophone.

Babel on the Nile (2) : multilingualism and multiculturalism in Late Antique Egypt (3)

Speaker(s)

Jean-Luc Fournet

Events

Babel on the Nile (2) : multilingualism and multiculturalism in Late Antique Egypt (1)

Review of UPZ I 148

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

Study of Byzantine papyri relating to multilingualism