Book Note | The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian Versus Greek in Late Antiquity

Jean-Luc Fournet, The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian Versus Greek in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

In the wake of J. N. Adams’s Bilingualism and the Latin Language (2003) and growing interest in ancient sociolinguistics, scholars of antiquity have become particularly attentive to the ubiquity of bilingual and multilingual individuals. Extant written materials contain traces of their linguistic practices. One of the enduring questions for those researching late ancient Egypt has been the relationship between Coptic and Greek, particularly since Coptic became the predominant language for legal documents only in the late sixth century despite its use for other forms of writing for centuries prior.[1] Jean-Luc Fournet takes up this question in The Rise of Coptic and charts “the chronology and mechanisms whereby Egyptian came to enter the domain of regulated writing” (2) and thereby broke Greek’s monopoly as an administrative language.

The Rise of Coptic contains four chapters based on Fournet’s 2017 Rostovtzeff Lectures at New York University. Chapter 1 explores the development and use of Coptic in the third through fifth centuries CE, as well as provides an overview of the use of vernacular languages in legal contexts throughout the Roman Empire. Fournet demonstrates that Demotic, an earlier written form of Egyptian, generally fell out of use by the first century CE, thus leaving many Egyptians with Greek as the primary language one in which one could write publicly or privately. Through his examination of a range of early Coptic (third and fourth centuries CE) texts from Kellis, Nag Hammadi, and the Kharga and Dakhla Oases, Fournet determines that Coptic was mostly used in rural contexts for a range of writings, including letters, annotations, glossaries, marginalia, and school exercises alongside Greek. Most importantly, Coptic served “a subliterary usage intended for learning oriented toward Greek or based on Greek” (15). Against the opinion that Coptic developed as an anti-Greek or countercultural script,[2] Fournet finds instead that Coptic was used as part of the project of Hellenization in Egypt. Whereas Syriac, Punic, or Assyrian were occasionally used as part of Roman imperial legal documentation and had historical precedence for their use before Roman occupation, Coptic developed under the eye of Rome’s administrative apparatus and did not have a history of use as a regulated language.

In chapter 2, Fournet explores the possible causes for the absence of legal acts taking place in Coptic, especially since there were courts that functioned in Egyptian in the Ptolemaic period. Why would courts not function in Egyptian in late antiquity? Fournet suggests that one possible reason is the diversity of Egyptian dialects between Upper and Lower Egypt, which contrasted with the linguistic uniformity of Greek koine (42-3). Coptic did not have a history as an administrative language (unlike Greek) and was not used for the production of original works until the sixth century with the important exception of Shenoute of Atripe. Fournet offers a powerful example of Greek’s primacy through Psoïs’s letter-petition to Apa John of Lycopolis, a famous monk (P.Herm. 7): Psoïs mimics the form of a Greek petition, albeit in mangled Greek, because he believed that legal documents sent to prominent figures ought to be written in Greek––even though Apa John likely only knew Egyptian (50-57). Not only is Greek the language of administration in the late ancient administration, but Fournet suggests that Coptic itself is a pidginized language that “lay(s) claim to a Greek cultural identity” (71). While Coptic did not immediately usurp Greek as the administrative language of Roman Egypt, it functioned as an auxiliary language used for non-legal correspondence, translation, and education.

In chapter 3, Fournet turns to the sixth and seventh centuries to explore the development of legal Coptic and its increased use in urban centers throughout the Thebaid. In particular, Fournet examines the fifteen legal documents written in Coptic extant before the Muslim conquest and determines not only that many are produced for small transactions, but also that Coptic was used for “pseudonotorial private acts” that were mediated by local deacons and village scribes rather than by notaries and courts (78-9). The ascent of Coptic documentary literature might, Fournet suggests, be related to the continued Christianization of Egypt in the fifth and sixth centuries, which diminished Greek’s cultural hegemony in Egyptian cities and villages (98-9). Coptic, then, became the language used for para-judicial legal processes and led to late ancient experimentation with an autonomous Coptic legal discourse, with Egyptians solving legal disputes among themselves rather than going to Greek courts (104-7).

Fournet’s final chapter complicates the stereotype of that Egyptian monks did not know Greek and were therefore opposed to Greek culture––perhaps best exemplified through the misattribution of Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian theologies to Greek and Coptophone speakers, respectively (112-4). Against this oversimplified Greek/Coptic divide, Fournet explores how ecclesiastical and monastic institutions used both Greek and Coptic in order to explain how administrative Coptic developed in such milieux beyond private correspondence. Through his examination of a Graeco-Coptic codex with taxpayer receipts, wills from the Monastery of St. Phoebammon at Der el-Bahari, and further legal documentation by Abraham of Hermonthis, Fournet demonstrates that monastic federations and churches functioned “as a coauthority to the state” (145). Such institutions collected taxes and issued tax receipts, produced wills, appointed clerics, guaranteed sureties, employed notary-clerics, and had some judicial authority over civil matters between ecclesiastical figures. The rise of Coptic as an administrative language thus depended on local churches and monasteries performing para-judicial exercises for their local communities.

Fournet’s The Rise of Coptic is a substantial and accessible contribution to the ongoing discussion of bilingualism and multilingualism in the ancient world. He incisively illuminates the chronological development of Egyptian as a legal(izing) language and Coptic as a regulated script through use of Coptic documentary papyri - sources that have been understudied by historians and classicists who have traditionally limited themselves to Greek and Latin archives for the study of the Roman Empire. Beyond the scope of sociolinguistics and papyrology, Fournet’s work challenges us not to view language use as a zero-sum game within a particular nation or culture. As Fournet notes, “contemporary Western societies have increasingly had to face the problem of multilingualisms and the coexistence of multicultural practices for which they are often ill prepared, because the monocultural national models in which they have developed have not prepared them to understand and manage these types of combinations” (ix). Perhaps one direction that Fournet opens for future scholarship is postcolonial analysis of the use of Coptic throughout late antiquity. How does our narrative of Roman and Byzantine Egypt shift if Coptic was not necessarily developed as a counter-cultural script, but rather functioned as an apparatus of Hellenization? How might the racialization of Egyptians by Greeks and Romans have led to the diminishment of Egyptian as a language with legal weight, and Coptic develop as a script that could demonstrate how Egyptians were active participants in the imperial Hellenizing (and Christianizing) project?[3] Fournet challenges us to view Coptic as a window into the lives and concerns of late ancient Egyptians, enmeshed in epistolary and judicial practices for which Coptic became useful.

[1] See Leslie S.B. MacCoull, Coptic Legal Documents: Law as Vernacular Text and Experience in Late Antique Egypt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).

[2] For example, Ewa Zakrzewska, “L* as a Secret Language: Social Functions of Early Coptic,” in Christianity and Monasticism in Middle Egypt: Al Minya and Assyut, Gawdat Gabra and Hany N. Takla, eds. (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2015), 185-198.

[3] One starting point may be expanding upon the classical depictions of Egyptians and the late ancient preservation of Egyptian traditions explored by Benjamin H. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 352-370; David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Chance Bonar is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the Committee on the Study of Religion, specializing in the New Testament and Early Christianity.