Knowledge of ancient Greek is required for the seminar.
This session was devoted to the Greek-Coptic bilingualism of the archives of Dioscorus of Aphrodite (6thcentury ), and in particular to the Coptic texts, which, although representing a significant part of this ensemble (around 10 %), have long been under-studied due to the dispersion of the texts and the academic divides dividing the disciplines. Examination of these papyri provides information that contradicts the vulgate according to which Coptic was restricted to the monastic milieu, and testifies to the secular use of this language in documents concerning people attested in Greek texts in the same archives, sometimes shedding new light on the latter.
Beyond the complementarity of the Greek and Coptic pans from a historical point of view, these archives have also proved decisive for the study of Coptic digraphism and paleography. In fact, this corpus of texts, whose provenance is certain and whose dating is guaranteed by the Greek documents, offers a wide range of graphic types, making it possible to study the individual bilingualism of the scribes on several levels. We have presented a file of eight letters (five in Coptic, three in Greek) written by a digraph scribe whose identification remains hypothetical. The study of the writings also made it possible to follow the Dioscore family over three generations, and to sketch out a few clues about diglossia in the documentation of this period.
