The role of the Church and monasticism in the officialization of Coptic
Alongside administrative initiatives, it was monastic circles that gave a major impetus to the emergence and development of a language capable of competing with Greek in non-private uses, as we have been able to ascertain from the study of three new or little-known documentary files. The first, the totally unpublished Greco-Coptic codex from the Louvre (6thcentury ), attests to the use of Coptic in a fiscal context, under the impetus of a monastic institution. The second file examined is that of the four wills of the superiors of the monastery of Saint-Phoibammôn, two of which predate the Arab conquest; but, whereas the first, that of Abraam, dated from the late 610s, is still written in Greek, for the second, drawn up some fifteen years later and whose testator is Victor, it is Coptic that is legally used. This switch from Greek to Coptic can no doubt be explained by Egypt's ten-year break with the Byzantine regime, at the time of the Sassanid domination (619-629), which, by relaxing the linguistic constraints weighing in particular on the drafting of wills, must have symbolically undermined the imperative of Greek's exclusivity in the legal sphere. This change in the legal-administrative framework also brought changes in the function of the will, which now conveyed a spiritual message to the entire monastic community, necessitating the use of a language understood by all.
