Babel on the Nile (3) : multilingualism and multiculturalism in Late Antique Egypt (7)

The appearance of the first legal documents in Coptic

Born in Hellenic-speaking circles, Coptic "escaped" its first users and spread to other circles; its sociology changed at the same time as the cultural and institutional framework began to transform. In particular, the use of Coptic in society became more visible a century or so before the Arab-Muslim conquest of 641/642. To understand why these texts appeared at this time, after three centuries of silence, we turned our attention to the corpus of Coptic legal acts prior to the conquest. This consists of some fifteen legal transactions and para-judicial acts, written by digraphic scribes. The transactions are mostly provisional and of minor importance. These documents all come from Thebaid, a region more deeply rooted in Egyptian tradition and less subject to the institutional, religious and cultural influence of Alexandria. What's more, they date back mainly to the years 600-610 and the Sassanid domination (619-629), two decades corresponding to two troubled periods in Egyptian history: the first, inaugurated by the overthrow and assassination of Maurice by Phocas (602), was a period of turbulence. The second period was marked by the Sassanid occupation (619-629), which removed Egypt from Byzantine rule. Political instability, by weakening the state apparatus, and above all, during the Sassanid period, the break with the Hellenic-speaking Byzantine state, by relaxing the constraints imposed by the prestige of the Greek language, must have contributed to widening the breach opened up in the previous century, encouraging the population to make more intensive use of Coptic.

What the geographical and chronological explanations have in common is that they point towards an explanation that puts the development of Coptic legal documents down to a retreat, a weakening or a default on the part of the state, and thus to a lightening of the pressure it could have brought to bear in terms of linguistic constraints.

Greek culture in decline

The rise of legal documents in Coptic is part of a broader decline of Greek and Hellenism in Egypt, as evidenced by papyrological documentation.

A crisis in judicial institutions ? Justice in Coptic

This cultural evolution serves as a backdrop to the emergence of Coptic legal documents, the reasons for which are ultimately to be found in changes in the way justice was administered, with the increasing use of private arbitration from the first half of the 6th^centuryonwards, and in the retreat of state justice, following the decline of normative state procedure and the development of less formal state procedures (late ^6th/early 7th^c.).

A misinterpreted document(SB Kopt. IV 1709), which turns out to be a petition in Coptic, accompanied by the judge's sentence (a defensor civitatis) in Coptic, provides proof that the judicial administration had finally opened up to the Coptic language by authorizing the drafting and instruction of petitions in this language. The conditions were thus ripe for the language to spread to the field of legal acts.