Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt was, at least in principle, a bilingual country in terms of writing: Greek, imposed by the Ptolemies (330–33 bce), was the official means of communication, and the indigenous varieties of Egyptian, i.e. Demotic and Coptic, were confined to specific subsets or cultural milieus of communication.
F., Professor for Culture écrite de l'Antiquité tardive et papyrologie byzantine at the Collège de France, addresses the issue of how and why Coptic emerged in Egypt as a written means of communication. The book is divided into four chapters and supplemented by three appendices providing further data.
Chapter 1, ‘An Egyptian Exception’, sketches Egypt's socio-cultural and linguistic milieus during the first centuries of the first millennium ce and compares it with other regions of the Roman/Byzantine empire. He discusses the earliest preserved Coptic texts and their text types and provenance. (Note that despite the fact that, e.g., the Kellis material was found in the western periphery of Egypt, those letters have been sent from the Nile valley.) Coptic is found at first in educational contexts and Bible translations as well as letters, but absent from juridical documents. Its cultural setting seems predominantly Christian, but not necessarily monastic or ecclesiastic. F. justly dispenses with older opinions that saw Coptic as an invention to counterbalance Greek in some nationalist attempt to regain (at least) linguistic independence. Instead, he proposes that Coptic was used by Hellenised Egyptians to communicate with their peers.
Chapter 2, ‘Why was Greek preferred to Coptic?’, seeks possible answers to that question. The first inhibition F. notes was the country's multi-dialect situation compared to the uniformity of the Greek koine. Here, he seems to streamline the situation on both sides. For one, there is no evidence that the Coptic dialects would be mutually unintelligible. Apart from regional preferences for certain lexemes, the most obvious differences are phonetic (as far as the script is able to convey them); a language in which ‘each phoneme …’ has ‘a single corresponding grapheme that can never serve to express another phoneme’ (p. 44) has still to see the light of day. In addition, F. seems to overly stretch J. van der Vliet's claim (‘As has been often observed, literary Coptic is to a large degree a constructed language. The kind of Sahidic Coptic that is taught in our universities has quite likely never been spoken by anybody’, in ‘Coptic Documentary Papyri after the Arab Conquest’, Journal of Juristic Papyrology 43 [2013], 195) by rephrasing it to ‘Sahidic, as documented by literary texts and taught today in universities, “is to a large degree a constructed language [which] has quite likely never been spoken by anybody”’ (p. 47). Van der Vliet's remark refers to the linguistic entity called Sahidic being taught without any diatopic or diachronic variance from literary texts (as being supposedly superior to documentary ones) at universities today. As F. presents it, Sahidic seems not to have been used as a language in Egypt at all. The supposed pidginised language (p. 72), i.e. Coptic, borrowed admittedly more than the average amount of words and did so even for lexical groups such as function words, which is rare in similar situations of language contact. However, borrowings never enter into the realm of morphology or syntax. Greek syntax is at times emulated, but this often happens in cases in which a translator seems to be struggling with the task. Greek from Egypt is, on the other hand, less uniform than corrected editions augmented by diacritics make us believe. It often shows different grades of mastery by non-native speakers as witnessed by diatopic influences such as the lamdacism of Greek texts from the Fayum prototypical for the regional variety of Coptic of that area.
Moving on to a later stage in Chapter 3, ‘The Rise of Legal Coptic and the Byzantine State’, F. examines the Coptic legal documents of the sixth and seventh centuries. He sees a development in two steps at work: (1) in the first half of the sixth century, in a semi-official legal setting of arbitrations, no non-native participants would be involved, and hence those present had no need to have recourse to Greek; instead, they were using Coptic. Step (2), the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century, brought a ‘loss of momentum … of the state normative process’ (p. 104). Lower-rank officials were now involved, and hence Coptic might have been more eligible in legal contexts. This, F. argues, might have been triggered by the near-universal diffusion of Christianity in the fifth century.
The fourth and final chapter examines ‘The Role of the Church and Monasticism in the Growth of Legal Coptic’. F. chooses several different sources from different contexts and areas and rightly argues against the supposed language division into Greek-speaking Chalcedonians and Coptic-speaking Miaphysites.
The appendices contain data to support selected arguments: Appendix 1 presents the ‘Coptic Endorsements in Greek Legal Texts’, all from the sixth century. In Appendix 2 ‘Fives Samples of Fourth-Century Coptic Letters’ are given with Coptic text and English translation. Finally, in Appendix 3, all Coptic legal documents predating the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641/42 are gathered. Note that the list contains only references to texts that can be securely dated, to which one might add P.Bas. II 66 (olim P.Bas.Copt. 1) from the latter half of the sixth century.
One of F.'s basic assumptions seems to be that language use was ordered by a central government. Yet, it could be questioned whether Byzantine rule actually extended much beyond the city walls it occupied with soldiers, policemen and administrators or the range of its detachments sent to the countryside. F. argues that the rise of Coptic in a legal context was a measure to relieve overburdened courts from cases. However, one may ask if the opposite was not the case, i.e., that a perception of official neglect by local subjects (based on whatever grounds) led to the installation of local courts, a legal practice often attested in the millennia prior to classical antiquity. Finally, there might be a certain low opinion of Coptic that could be read into the linguistic arguments explaining why Coptic was not suitable for legal texts. This is not uncommon, as Coptic is sometimes treated by scholars of Greek as if it were Greek's poor country cousin: inelegant, syntactically dull and semantically clumsy. In addition, Greek scholars often seem to stumble over the pitfall of the linguistic denominations of the Egyptian language – whereas Old, Middle and Late Egyptian perfectly label a diachronic development, Demotic and Coptic seem to mark new languages rather than new stages of the same language – thus ignoring a historical dimension of language and culture.
Despite my last words and some minor issues unmentioned due to their irrelevance for the general readership (some errors spotted in the Coptic parts do not change the general argument), the book presents a plethora of thought-provoking ideas that will stimulate further discussion on the topic.
