Zeta ⲍ

Zeta is the seventh letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value seven. It joins gamma and delta in the group of Greek letters that Coptic adopted without native need, because Egyptian of the Coptic period had no z sound of its own. The letter therefore lives almost entirely in borrowed material: Greek loanwords, Greek names, and the theological and philosophical vocabulary that came into Egyptian Christianity from Greek. Its numeral value made it independently indispensable, since seven is a number Coptic texts need constantly, from the days of the week to the seven sacraments of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the sevenfold divisions that structure a great deal of scriptural and monastic literature.

Zeta is a particularly good index of the Greek weight of a given Coptic text. In a plain gospel translation it is uncommon; in the Coptic codices from Nag Hammadi, whose contents are translations of Greek religious and philosophical works and are dense with technical terms and with names drawn from Greek cosmological speculation, it appears far more often. Counting a letter is a crude measure of a text, but in a script assembled from two sources it is not a meaningless one, and it shows something about a manuscript before a word of it has been read.

In 1945 a sealed jar containing thirteen leather bound Coptic codices was found near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The books date from the fourth century and hold more than fifty separate works, most of them Coptic translations of texts composed in Greek, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and a wide range of writings usually grouped under the label Gnostic. The find transformed what could be known about the varieties of early Christian thought in Egypt, because until then most of that material was known only from the hostile summaries of the writers who opposed it.

Zeta belongs to the part of the Coptic alphabet that carries the Greek layer of the language, and that layer is unusually thick in these codices. Their vocabulary is full of Greek terms for spiritual entities, for kinds of knowledge and for the structure of the cosmos, retained rather than translated, so the letters that write Greek sounds appear far more densely here than in a biblical text. Reading the codices is therefore an exercise in reading two languages at once, Egyptian grammar carrying Greek vocabulary, in a Greek derived script with Egyptian additions. The books also matter as physical objects, since their covers, bindings and quire structures survive, making them among the earliest well preserved codices anywhere and a principal source for how books were made in late antique Egypt.