Alpha ⲁ

Alpha is the first letter of the Coptic alphabet and the plainest example of what Coptic is: the Egyptian language written in Greek letters. Egyptian had been written for three thousand years in hieroglyphs and in the cursive hands derived from them, hieratic and then Demotic, all of which recorded consonants and left the reader to supply the vowels. From about the first century of the common era Egyptian speakers began instead to write their language in the Greek alphabet, at first in scattered experiments now grouped under the label Old Coptic, and by the fourth century in a settled orthography that served the church. Alpha came across in that borrowing unchanged in shape, in name and in value. It writes the vowel a, short or long according to context, and in the alphabetic numeral system that Coptic also took from Greek it stands for one. That numeral use is not decorative: Coptic manuscripts number their chapters, their quires and their psalms with letters, so alpha appears at the head of countless pages as a figure rather than as a sound.

The letter also carries a specifically Christian charge that Coptic inherited rather than invented. In the Book of Revelation God and Christ are named the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, and the pairing of the two letters became a compact name for eternity across the Christian east and west alike. Coptic funerary stelae, textiles and church fittings from Egypt carry the two letters together, often flanking a cross, and the fact that they are Greek letters standing in an Egyptian Christian setting is exactly the cultural situation that produced the Coptic script in the first place.

Coptic was never a single written standard. Several regional dialects were committed to writing, of which Sahidic, centred on the Nile valley of Upper Egypt, became the dominant literary form in the first Christian millennium, while Bohairic, of the Delta, later replaced it as the language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and remains its liturgical language today. Alpha appears in every one of them, but not always in the same places, because the dialects differ in precisely the vowels that the Greek alphabet had at last made visible. Words written with alpha in one dialect appear with a different vowel letter in another, and comparative tables of those correspondences are a standard tool for placing an undated manuscript. This is a capacity the older Egyptian scripts simply did not have: a Demotic text conceals the vowel differences that a Coptic text displays, so the linguistic history of Egyptian before Coptic has to be reconstructed indirectly.

Alpha also sits at the centre of Coptic scribal habit. The letter is written with a single flowing movement in the round uncial hands of the great biblical codices, and in the more angular later hands it becomes a compact triangle. Scribes marked it with the superlinear stroke that Coptic uses to show a syllabic consonant nearby, and they used it as a numeral in the margins. In the Nag Hammadi codices, a Coptic library of the fourth century containing translations of Greek religious and philosophical works, alpha stands both for the Egyptian vowel and for the Greek one, in the same line, in the same hand.