The earliest Coptic texts are literary, with just one exception, a private letter found at Kellis (Dakhla oasis) - a singular document that is, for the time being, an oddity. This late 3rd or early 4thcentury document has been variously interpreted as either Old Coptic or the first documentary example of Coptic. The issue at stake is the relationship between Old Coptic and Coptic and, beyond this writing problem, the transition from paganism to Christianity: supporters of a model of continuity between the two are opposed by those who advocate a theory of rupture, more likely due to the function of these two scripts and the environment in which they appear. While Old Coptic served to render a fixed pagan ritual heritage more comprehensible or performative, Coptic was a lingua franca developed by Christians both to render and disseminate a new Greek-language heritage (the Bible) and to communicate with one another. Our Kellis ostracon therefore falls into the category of texts written in Coptic, even if its language can legitimately be described as " protocopte " (or to follow R. Kasser's terminology, " protocopte graphèmes vieux-coptes ") : it shows us the beginnings of Coptic writing before its standardization.
The virtual absence of Coptic documents in the first phase of the script's use is a sobering reminder. The function of a literary text is very different from that of a documentary text: the former is a cultural object whose dissemination is supposed to go beyond the particular case of the person who possesses it, to be part of a long-term process and to be part of an activity of the mind (which can be purely intellectual or take on more specific forms, such as religious edification) ; the latter is a text conveying information useful within the limited framework of those who write and read them, normally part of the urgency of daily action (letters, petitions, contracts, administrative documents). Each one documents very different human activities, and in this respect, the gap that may have existed, at the end of the 3rdcentury , between the use of Coptic in the documentary field and the literary field is not insignificant. It was not until the following century that documentary production in Coptic really took off, while literary production continued to intensify. To better understand this discrepancy, we must now examine these early Coptic documents, which, unlike literary texts, have the advantage of being more easily contextualized and of giving us a better understanding of the profiles of those who wrote them.
