Abstract
The question of the Christianization of the " pagan " culture that prevailed before the triumph of the new Christian religion is a subject on which the bibliography continues to grow, proposing various, even contradictory, models of interpretation to apprehend the relationship between Christian culture and pagan culture (for example, models of antagonism, continuity or even overcoming and synthesis). The aim here is not to add another model to those already developed, nor, for that matter, to deal with the Christianization of the ancient world, but with the Christianization of written culture.
Historians interested in this question have most often limited their investigation to literary writings or, for those who have also taken documentary sources into consideration, to the epistolary genre alone - and even then, only until the institutionalization of Christianity in the 4th century. Yet Egypt is one of the few regions of the Empire to offer unique conditions for observing how documents as a whole were able to evolve both in content and form under the influence of Christianity.
By reinvesting the field of everyday writing, and examining the written word as a cultural product, this new cycle, which follows on from the archaeology of the written word initiated with the study of multilingualism, begins a reflection on how the development of a new culture may have conditioned ancient writing (in terms of content, form and medium). For the first time , the phenomenon of Christianization will be studied through both literary and documentary papyri, to see how their respective evolutions bear witness to a dialectic between Christianity and traditional culture between the 4th and 7thcenturies .
