What Is Coptic and Who Were the Copts in Ancient Egypt?

A short history of ancient Egyptian language

By Megan Sauter

What is Coptic, and who were the Copts in ancient Egypt?

The Coptic language is the final stage of ancient Egyptian language. Even though it looks very different from texts written in Old Egyptian using hieroglyphs, the two are related. In his article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” in the November/December 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Leo Depuydt gives a short history of the development of ancient Egyptian language and shows where the Coptic language fits in that timeline, as well as answering the question: Who were the Copts.

What Is Coptic?

The Coptic language developed around 300 C.E. in Egypt. It is Egyptian language written using the Greek alphabet, as well as a couple of Demotic signs. This script was much easier to learn than the earlier writing systems used in ancient Egypt: hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts.

Coptic was the lingua franca of Egypt when Egypt was predominantly Christian. Many assume that the Coptic language was developed primarily to spread Christianity, but Depuydt disagrees. He supports the great Belgian Coptologist Louis Théophile Lefort’s theory that the Coptic language was created by another group—the Jews.

The online battle for papyrus texts

Papyrus scrolls are also now increasingly desirable items in the distinctly 21st Century world of the online auction trade, writes Philip Sherwell

By Philip Sherwell, New York

They are tattered yellowing fragments of bygone civilisations, ancient manuscripts that open a remarkable window on previous millennia, including the earliest days of Christianity.

But papyrus scrolls are also now increasingly hot items in the distinctly 21st Century world of the online auction trade.

A rectangular scrap measuring about 4.5 inches by 1.5 inches and featuring 15 partial lines of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad in the elegant hand of a 4th Century Egyptian scribe was just [DEC] picked up by an unidentified European buyer for £16,000 after a feverish Internet auction battle.

That price was way above the posted estimated but is typical of the sums that collectors will now spend to lay their hands on these fingerprints from the past.

Indeed, it is not just modern art that has been setting jaw-dropping records at auction recently - so have ancient scrolls.

When a fragmentary parchment sheet from the 3rd century AD featuring portions of Paul’s epistle to the Romans was bought at Sotheby’s for £301,000 auctioneers and antiquity experts alike were stunned.

Ancient Egyptian Handbook of Spells Deciphered

by Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor   |   November 20, 2014

Researchers have deciphered an ancient Egyptian handbook, revealing a series of invocations and spells.

Among other things, the "Handbook of Ritual Power," as researchers call the book, tells readers how to cast love spells, exorcise evil spirits and treat "black jaundice," a bacterial infection that is still around today and can be fatal.

The book is about 1,300 years old, and is written in Coptic, an Egyptian language. It is made of bound pages of parchment — a type of book that researchers call a codex.

"It is a complete 20-page parchment codex, containing the handbook of a ritual practitioner," write Malcolm Choat and Iain Gardner, who are professors in Australia at Macquarie University and the University of Sydney, respectively, in their book, "A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power" (Brepols, 2014).

The ancient book "starts with a lengthy series of invocations that culminate with drawings and words of power," they write. "These are followed by a number of prescriptions or spells to cure possession by spirits and various ailments, or to bring success in love and business."

For instance, to subjugate someone, the codex says you have to say a magical formula over two nails, and then "drive them into his doorpost, one on the right side (and) one on the left."

Egypt dig may have unearthed earliest image of Jesus

Curly-haired young man on wall of 6th-century early Christian tomb could have been Christ, postulate Spanish Egyptologists.

By Ruth Schuster | Apr. 27, 2014

A team of Spanish Egyptologists may have found one of the earliest-known pictures of Jesus Christ, in a 6th-century tomb unearthed in Upper Egypt. That and other images are painted onto the walls of a crypt inside an underground structure, whose use has otherwise baffled the finders.

The main attraction at Al Bahnasa is Oxyrhynchus, which was a regional capital in ancient Upper Egypt some 160km south of Cairo, where interestingly the locals apparently worshipped a sacred Nile fish that, according to legend, swallowed Osiris' penis when he was dismembered by his brother Seth. The ancient city also boasts a number of temples to Osiris. But the "exceptional" discovery the archaeological team made in the tomb dates from a much later era, the 6th century C.E., says the team headed by Spanish archaeologist Josep Padro.

The tomb is believed to have been the interment site for a writer and a priestly family, though the archaeologists do not understand the function of the underground stone structure, they admit. But inside the crypt, they found an image from the first Coptic Christian period showing a young man with curly hair and a short tunic, with a hand raised in blessing.

That, the team postulates, could be one of the earliest-known representations of Christ known in the world. Coptic writing surrounding the image is under translation.

It bears noting that portrait art at the time did not always seek to capture the realistic image of a precise person. The product could be representative rather than specific: the artist would give the king a kingly brow and nose, rather than seek to capture his actual likeness, warts and all. Even if the image found was a representation of Jesus Christ, it might not necessarily have been based on specific knowledge of his appearance, of which no known description exists. Roman portrait is one example that differed in conveying realism, even to the extreme.

An even earlier image believed to be of Jesus Christ – beardless and walking on water - was found in Syria in 2011, from around the year 235 C.E. That and several scenes from the New Testament were found at a house that served as a church in the intensely multicultural city of Dura-Europos.  

More extremely early depictions of Jesus Christ, mostly as a baby but some in adult form, were found on the walls of tombs dating from the 2nd and 3rd century in the Rome catacombs. 

Source: http://www.haaretz.com

Egyptian years and days

Many Egyptians continue to use several yearly calendars, the heritage of the country’s different religious traditions, writes Samia Abdennour

“The Egyptian calendar is certainly the only rational calendar that has ever been devised,” wrote the ancient Greek historian Herodotus after his visit to Egypt in the fifth century BCE.

The ancient Egyptians were one of the first nations to use a solar calendar, in around 3,000 BCE, and this shows their great regard for science and the high level of scientific knowledge they had attained. Their calendar was based on the phases of the River Nile and the associated activities in the fields of flooding, seedtime and harvesting, these making up three distinct seasons of four months each. 

These seasons shaped the lives and character of the Egyptian fellaheen (peasants) who were so engrossed in agriculture and the land that they left all other matters — social, political and economic — to outsiders. It was this that facilitated the foreign control of the country and that led to the peasants’ eventual oppression.

Egyptians today use three calendars, the Islamic, Coptic and Western calendar, the last being used by people of both faiths for most secular or official purposes. The Islamic calendar is used only for religious purposes, while the Coptic calendar is used to mark the events of the Christian year and the agricultural almanac by farmers of both faiths. 

The names given to the Islamic months were largely adopted from those of the jahiliya (the “time of ignorance” before the coming of Islam), while the names of the Coptic months are derived from the names of ancient Egyptian gods.

Roman ruins in Old Cairo

by Abdel-Rahman Sherief  /   April 9, 2013

The remnants of a historic city hidden in Coptic Cairo


The remnants of Fort Babylon, a colossal round building located near the Coptic Museum and the Greek Orthodox St. George Church, are often overlooked by tourists and neglected by tour guides when they visit the old Coptic area of Cairo.

The fort was built by the Romans northeast of the old capital Memphis and overlooked the Nile, meant to secure transportation along the river between Upper and Lower Egypt. In the present day there is little left of its former glory.

The fort was built on the southern end of the old Pharaonic town Per-Hapi-On, or ‘The river house of On’. According to some historians the mispronunciation of the name by the Romans led to the name Fort Babylon but others claim it was named after a number of captives brought there from Babylonia during the time of Sesostris.

Roman Emperor Diocletian built the fort in 300 C.E. as the stronghold of three legions in charge of securing Egypt. The garrison of Fort Babylon vowed to secure ships on the Nile and a canal that passed through the town connecting the Nile with the Red Sea. This canal was first established by the Pharaohs, and was restored and enlarged by the Roman Emperor Trajan. The fort was renovated and fortified by the Roman Emperor Arcadius.

The harbour flourished, hosting ships from the Red and Mediterranean Seas, and the city thrived and became Egypt’s centre of commerce. This prompted the Roman emperors and governors to enlarge the garrison and dedicate resources to the city.

Truth Behind Gospel of Judas Revealed in Ancient Inks

By: Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer 
Published: 04/08/2013 11:37 AM EDT on LiveScience

A long-lost gospel that casts Judas as a co-conspirator of Jesus, rather than a betrayer, was ruled most likely authentic in 2006. Now, scientists reveal they couldn't have made the call without a series of far more mundane documents, including Ancient Egyptian marriage licenses and property contracts.

The Gospel of Judas is a fragmented Coptic (Egyptian)-language text that portrays Judas in a far more sympathetic light than did the gospels that made it into the Bible. In this version of the story, Judas turns Jesus over to the authorities for execution upon Jesus' request, as part of a plan to release his spirit from his body. In the accepted biblical version of the tale, Judas betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.

As part of a 2006 National Geographic Society (the Society) investigation of the document, microscopist Joseph Barabe of McCrone Associates in Illinois and a team of researchers analyzed the ink on the tattered gospel to find out if it was real or forged.

Some of the chemicals in the ink raised red flags — until Barabe and his colleagues found, at the Louvre Museum, a study of Egyptian documents from the third century A.D., the same time period of the Gospal of Judas.

"What the French study told us is that ink technology was undergoing a transition," Barabe told LiveScience. The Gospel of Judas' odd ink suddenly fit into place.

Coptic Culture: Past, Present and Future - A Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2013.02.08 

Mariam F. Ayad, Coptic Culture: Past, Present and Future.   Stevenage:  Coptic Orthodox Church Centre, 2011.  Pp. xiii, 238.  ISBN 9781935488279.  $45.00.   

Reviewed by Heike Behlmer, Universität Göttingen


The present volume comprises papers from a conference held in May 2008 at the Coptic Orthodox Centre in Stevenage, UK. The conference brought together specialists in the history and culture of Egypt and the Coptic Orthodox Church from late antiquity to the present day and Coptic clergy and laypersons interested in the cultural and literary heritage of their church. This approach has led to fruitful discussions among the participants, the results of which are documented in this well-produced and accessible volume. 

“The Coptic Orthodox Church: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”, the introductory remarks by Bishop Angaelos, General Bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the UK (p. 1-10) focus on the traditional pillars of the Coptic Orthodox faith in the modern context of a diaspora community. This introduction is followed by 19 contributions touching on four main areas of research: (1) continuities and discontinuities between Pharaonic and Christian Egypt, (2) sources for our knowledge about late antique and early medieval Egypt, (3) questions of heritage preservation and (4) the artistic tradition of the modern Coptic church. 

The first group of articles focuses on linguistic links between the Pharaonic and later periods and the survival of ritual practices. Mariam Ayad’s contribution “The Death of Coptic: A Reprisal” (p. 11-41) takes issue with the notion of Coptic as a “dead” language and makes some very valid points: in the past scholars have often shown little interest in the entire use-life of the Coptic language, neglecting the study of later, especially liturgical Coptic. While her concerns are shared by the vast majority of modern scholars, I am uncertain about her choice of a case study, a retranslation of the Paschal hymn into Ancient Egyptian, using hieroglyphs to render the words of Egyptian origin, intended to visualise the link between the modern liturgy and the ancient language. This link is well known and a translation from the Coptic into an Ancient Egyptian that never existed in the form set forth in the article seems to confuse the issue unnecessarily. 

Jesus's Wife? Scholar Announces Existence of a New Early Christian Gospel from Egypt

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2012) — Four words on a previously unknown papyrus fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, Harvard Professor Karen King told the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies today.

King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, announced the existence of the ancient text at the Congress's meeting, held every four years and hosted this year by the Vatican's Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome. The four words that appear on the fragment translate to, "Jesus said to them, my wife." The words, written in Coptic, a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, are on a papyrus fragment of about one and a half inches by three inches.

"Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," King said. "This new gospel doesn't prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began appealing to Jesus's marital status to support their positions."

Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, believes the fragment to be authentic based on examination of the papyrus and the handwriting, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, a Coptic expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, considers it likely to be authentic on the basis of language and grammar, King said. Final judgment on the fragment, King said, depends on further examination by colleagues and further testing, especially of the chemical composition of the ink.

One side of the fragment contains eight incomplete lines of handwriting, while the other side is badly damaged and the ink so faded that only three words and a few individual letters are still visible, even with infrared photography and computer photo enhancement. Despite its tiny size and poor condition, King said, the fragment provides tantalizing glimpses into issues about family, discipleship, and marriage that concerned ancient Christians.

From the Sands of Egypt

By Michael Gordon   Fri, Apr 13, 2012

The discovery of the world's largest trove of ancient writings has opened an unparalleled window on a vanished world.

El-Behnesa, Egypt, 1896. There was little to see. It was a landscape of windblown sand surrounding a sleepy arab village. But for Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, young English scholars of classicism from the Queen's College in Oxford, there was something about the place that screamed at them. Set astride a small river that anciently served as a canal of the Nile, they knew it was the location of two ancient cities, the more ancient called Per-Medjed, a capital of the Egyptian 19th Dynasty, and the younger called Oxyrhynchus Polis (meaning "City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish"), a Greco-Roman town initially under the Ptolemaic rulership of 3rd-1st century B.C. Egypt. Now, only a lone well-weathered Greek column, a few traces of stone and banks of sand hinted at an ancient presence. This place was nothing like the visual splendor that greeted explorers and adventurers at sites like Luxor, Giza, and Abu Simbel.

  

But Grenfell and Hunt were not interested in architecture. They were interested in researching ancient papyri, and having recently excavated in the Fayum area, the region surrounding the well-known ancient Egyptian site of Crocodilios, they had hopes that this new, relatively obscure site might yield something significant. 

From Ptolemaic and Roman rule to the Arab Conquest (332 BC - 646 AD)

Ptolemaic Egypt began when a follower of Alexander the Great Ptolemy I Soter declared himself Pharaoh of Egypt in 305 BC and ended with the death of Queen Cleopatra VII and the Roman conquest in 30 BC. The Ptolemaic Kingdom was a powerful Hellenistic state, extending from southern Syria in the east, to Cyrene to the west, and south to the frontier with Nubia. Alexandria became the capital city and a center of Greek culture and trade.

To gain recognition by the native Egyptian populace, they referred to themselves as successors to the Pharaohs. The later Ptolemies took on Egyptian traditions, had themselves portrayed on public monuments in Egyptian style and dress, and participated in Egyptian religious life. Hellenistic culture continued to thrive in Egypt well after the Muslim conquest.

Eventually the Ptolemies faced rebellions of native Egyptians often caused by an unwanted regime and were involved in foreign and civil wars that led to the decline of the kingdom and its annexation by Rome.
       

A Coptic city uncovered in Dakhla

The remains of a 4th century city were found at Dakhla oasis

by Nevine El-Aref , Wednesday 30 Nov 2011

During routine excavations at the Ain Al-Sabil area of Dakhla oasis, an Egyptian mission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) stumbled on what it believes to be a Coptic settlement dating back to the 4th century AD.

Mostafa Amin, the Secretary General of the SCA, made the announcement, explaining that the newly discovered settlement consists of remains of residential houses and service buildings as well as a large Basilica with distinguished columns and a wooden alter adorned with foliage decoration and icons showing Jesus, the Virgin Mary, angels and saints.

“I am very happy with what the mission has found; because it is the first time this area was explored,” Amin told Ahram Online. He continued that this new discovery not only forms another another archaeological attraction but “will lead us to other settlements that can be dated to different eras as well.”

The Head of Islamic and Coptic Antiquities department, Mohsen Sayed Aly said that excavators also uncovered a number of houses, bronze coins dating to the 3rd and 4th century AD, as well as a collection of clay pots. Aly pointed out that one complete and fully furnished house was found. It consist of a large hall enclosing several small living rooms, a kitchen, an oven and a large staircase.
Excavations are now in full swing, aiming in order to uncover more of the city.

Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/42/28128/Heritage/Coptic/A-Coptic-city-uncovered-in-Dakhla.aspx