The marginal place of Coptic in written culture
With the exception of P.Kellis VII 123, analyzed in the previous lecture, all legal documents, including the summaries they sometimes contain, are written in Greek. The invisibility of Coptic in public documents has its counterpart in the public sphere: Coptic was probably never used for monumental inscriptions before the end of the 6th century.Thus, during the first three centuries of its existence, Coptic attested to a very narrow spectrum of use, confined to the realm of private epistolary exchanges and the copying of pre-existing (Christian) literary texts, - a confinement that even had an influence on Coptic writing itself.
How can we account for the invisibility of Coptic outside the realm of private epistolary exchanges? If the hypothesis of an accident of documentation alone cannot explain the total lack of legal documents in this language, what about that which would seek to establish a causal link between law and the language of legal expression ?
The situation throughout the Empire : legal sources and Near Eastern papyri
Extending the investigation beyond the Egyptian context and into legal literature, we find that papyri from the Nile region do not support the conclusions of jurists, for whom the use of language is irrelevant, as long as the parties understand each other, while comparison with 3rd-century legal acts from the Middle Euphrates shows a situation at the opposite end of the spectrum to what was happening at the same time in Egypt, so that we may question the relevance of drawing parallels between the Egyptian and Near Eastern situations.
