After last year's focus on the emergence of a new written form of Egyptian, Coptic, in the 3rd century A.D., and an examination of the environments in which it developed and the ways in which it was disseminated, this year's lectures examine the way in which Coptic, inseparable from Christianity, cohabited with Greek, the official language since Alexander's conquest. This cohabitation was anything but static, and the areas of specialization occupied by Coptic and Greek evolved considerably.
Initially, the use of Coptic was restricted to private and/or religious communication (correspondence between individuals or between members of monastic communities), while Greek had a monopoly on administrative and legal writing, as well as on literary creation, but the situation changed during the 6th century. Coptic began to penetrate domains previously closed to it: it became an idiom of large-scale literary production; it gradually carved out a place for itself in the liturgy; it acquired the status of a legal language suitable for the drafting of regulated transactions between private individuals; it even came to be used in relations between the authorities and the governed. The reasons for its stagnation during the first three centuries of its history (with parallels in other Hellenic-speaking societies of the Near East) and its increasing emancipation from 550 onwards are worth exploring.
Behind the question of languages and their competitive relationships, the profound cultural, religious and political changes undergone by Late Antique society are at stake. Multilingualism is one of the keys to understanding these changes.