Coptic

Coptic is the final chapter of four thousand years of Egyptian writing. By the early centuries CE the old scripts, hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic, were the property of a shrinking priestly class, while Greek was the language of administration and increasingly of daily life. Egyptian speakers began writing their own language in Greek letters, adding signs from demotic for the sounds Greek lacked; the system settled at the Greek alphabet plus six or seven Egyptian letters, varying by dialect.

The decisive push came from Christianity: translating scripture demanded a script ordinary believers could learn, and from the third and fourth centuries the Bible was rendered into the Sahidic and later the Bohairic dialect. Monasticism, born in Egypt with Antony and organised by Pachomius, wrote its rules, letters and lives of the fathers in Coptic, and Shenoute of Atripe made it a vehicle of powerful native prose. Because Coptic writes vowels, unlike its Egyptian ancestors, it preserved at last the vocalisation of the Egyptian language, which made it the indispensable key when Champollion approached the hieroglyphs, and it remains the living voice by which scholarship hears ancient Egyptian sounds.

The Coptic script preserves several worlds of religious literature. The canonical scriptures and the monastic classics stand at its centre, but its most famous modern discovery is the Nag Hammadi library, thirteen papyrus codices unearthed in 1945 containing Gnostic and other esoteric works in Coptic translation, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and the Apocryphon of John, texts otherwise lost that transformed the study of early Christianity. Manichaean books in Coptic from Medinet Madi and the later found Gospel of Judas widen the same window: for several suppressed currents of late antique religion, Coptic manuscripts are effectively the only surviving witness.

Within the Coptic Orthodox Church the script never died. Although Arabic replaced Coptic as the spoken language over the medieval centuries, the liturgy of Saint Basil and its companion rites are still celebrated in Coptic, service books print the script with Arabic facing text, and the revival movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries restored its teaching in church schools. Hymns in the Bohairic dialect, chanted to melodies the community regards as ancient, keep the sounds of the script alive, and for Copts in Egypt and the diaspora the letters themselves are a visible bond to the church of the martyrs and the desert fathers.