Sahidic Coptic

Sahidic is the Upper Egyptian dialect that served as the literary standard of Coptic from roughly the third century to about the tenth, and it is the dialect in which most of what matters for the study of early Egyptian Christianity was written. The earliest Coptic biblical translations are Sahidic, and they are early enough to bear on the text of the New Testament, because they were made from Greek manuscripts older than most that survive in Greek.

Bentley Layton's grammar is the standard modern description. Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in the Greek alphabet with a handful of signs taken from Demotic for sounds Greek lacked, which is why the language of the pharaohs can be read aloud by anyone who knows Greek letters. The vocabulary is heavily Greek as well, so a Coptic sentence often carries an Egyptian grammar with Greek words for the theological terms sitting inside it, which is itself a record of how the religion arrived.

The monastic literature is Sahidic too. The rules and letters of Pachomius, who organised communal monasticism in the fourth century, the sermons of Shenoute of Atripe, who is the greatest prose writer the language produced and who wrote at enormous length, and the sayings of the desert fathers in their Coptic forms all belong to this dialect. Monasticism was invented in Egypt, and a large part of its founding documentation is in Sahidic.

The find that made Sahidic known outside Coptic studies was made in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, where a jar was opened containing thirteen leather bound codices holding some fifty texts, almost all of them previously unknown and nearly all in Sahidic. They include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Truth.

Almost every one of them is a translation from Greek, so the codices preserve in Coptic a body of second and third century Christian and Gnostic literature that does not survive in its original language. Before 1945 the systems described in those texts were known chiefly from the writings of the bishops who attacked them, which is the same problem the atlas records for Canaanite religion and for a dozen other traditions. The library allowed those movements to be read in their own words for the first time.

Why the codices were buried is not known. That they were found near a Pachomian monastic settlement, and that some of the bindings were stiffened with waste papyrus including monastery documents, has produced a long argument about whether monks owned them and whether they were concealed after a ruling on which books were acceptable. The atlas records that question as open.