Review: The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity, by Jean-Luc Fournet

Abstract

In four short but dense chapters, Jean-Luc Fournet analyzes the emergence and growing use of Coptic as a written language by the population of Upper Egypt in Late Antiquity. His primary focus is the use of Coptic for documents rather than for literature. As an expert on the archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito—a bilingual sixth-century villager who owned some of the earliest public documents known in Coptic—Fournet is eminently qualified for this project. The result is a book that is richly researched, clearly argued, and well illustrated.The first two chapters deal with the uses of Coptic between the third and sixth centuries. Like others before him, Fournet claims that what we call Coptic—that is, a late form of Egyptian written with a modified Greek alphabet and numerous Greek loanwords—was first created in cities or Hellenized areas (such as the Fayum) by bilingual Christians in order to translate parts of the Bible. The earliest texts themselves imply an educational or scholarly context. Fournet emphasizes the profound Hellenism of these third-century Christians. He claims that Coptic was “an auxiliary to the Hellenization process” (66), a complement to Greek training. It “was invented by Hellenographs for Hellenographs” (69). Besides the numerous loanwords—which include prepositions, particles, and so on—the shape of the Egyptian letters adopted and even the use of Greek diacritics indicate that the producers of these texts were used to Greek texts.Why then did they translate them? Fournet argues that “their aim was not to forge a new instrument for themselves with which to proselytize non-Greek-speaking populations, as has often been thought—this would not come until later—but rather to construct, in their own language, a cultural heritage that would be experienced as an extension and complement of the Greek heritage, while providing themselves with a specific communication tool that, just like Greek, would be ‘a prestige variety,’ a language that would also serve as a reference without competing with Greek” (74). This explanation is, in my opinion, unconvincing. It fails to explain, for example, the extreme dialectal variety that is so characteristic of Coptic texts. Above all, it ignores the spoken language altogether. We know that Christians were present in Egyptian villages from the third century. It is virtually certain that many of those villagers had only a superficial knowledge of Greek, and oral translations of the Bible were inevitable. Surely, this is a very important part of the context for the emergence of Coptic.In any case, Fournet argues that in the fourth century, Coptic—this scholarly Hellenizing invention—escapes those narrow circles and begins to be used for other purposes, such as the writing of documents. Yet the literary origin of the language is evident in the fact that, for three centuries, Coptic documents—virtually all private letters—are usually written in capital, book-like letters, unlike the cursive used for Greek documents. Moreover, these documents are never public or legal documents, even though Roman law did allow for public documents in virtually any language by this period. In fact, before the late sixth century, Coptic was only used for translations of literature or private, informal communication. This, in Fournet’s view, makes Coptic an “exception.”An exception to what rule? The rule of Syria, where Syriac and other Aramaic dialects were apparently used for documents and certainly used for inscriptions throughout this period. But isn’t Syria itself the exception? Aramaic in its different varieties is not strictly comparable to Coptic: it had a far older written tradition (and writing system); it had been used for documents for centuries; it had once been a lingua franca of the empires of the Near East; it was spoken by people inside and outside the Roman empire in a huge area; and, above all, it was taught in schools and used for original literature. It is Demotic that needs to be compared to Aramaic, and the reasons for its failure are well known: its cumbersome and inconvenient writing system, its progressive exclusion from the public sphere by Greek-speaking authorities, and its institutional attachment to temples that lost their economic power under Roman rule (see 61–65).As posed by Fournet, the “failure” of Coptic seems to me a false problem and his attempt to explain it unpersuasive. Why was Coptic not used for legal documents? Besides the obvious answers—the traditional prestige of Greek as a tool of government and literature and the centrality of Greek Alexandria for Egyptian society and culture in Late Antiquity—Fournet suggests two reasons. First, the dialectal diversity of Coptic made it unsuitable to legal texts. The standardized variety of Coptic we call Sahidic was an artificial, elite language that nobody spoke and hence was unattractive as an alternative to Greek. Let me state clearly that we have no evidence for this claim. It seems highly unlikely to me that Sahidic was an “artificial” or “elite” language. To understand its position, we need a more sophisticated understanding of how language works. I suggest looking at the work of ethnolinguists such as John Gumperz, who has demonstrated how among villagers in northern India certain groups—namely, the traditional hinge groups (traders, wandering performers, religious ascetics) that link village to city—make use of a regional dialect as a superposed variant.1 Regional dialects are learned after childhood as a conscious effort and are at least partially independent of vernaculars. Such dialects are used as a means of supravillage communication, linking villages to each other and, more importantly, connecting villages to one or more urban nuclei, the economic, social, and cultural centers of a given region. Sahidic could have played this role in the linguistic landscape of late ancient Egypt.Second, Fournet claims that the Christian church was fundamentally Greek: its liturgy and theology were purely Greek and thus not conducive to the public use of Coptic. Although there is some truth to this characterization, its application here, in the context of the historical rise of Coptic, is misleading. What is peculiar about Christianity among the religions of the book is the speed and ease with which it translates its scriptures into the local languages of the areas to which it spreads. There has never been a truly sacred Christian language, unlike Hebrew or Arabic. It is surely no coincidence that the process of Christianization outside the Roman empire is parallel to the spread of literacy in local languages. Indeed, as Fournet readily admits, interpreters are attested in the Egyptian clergy from very early on (60–61). What could their job have been other than to translate the readings and liturgy into Coptic? In any case, why would Fournet’s argument for the Greek nature of the church apply to Egypt but not to Syria?The second half of the book studies the slow, gradual emergence of a legal, “regulated” Coptic language in the late sixth and seventh centuries. The earliest extant Coptic legal document dates to 550 CE, but the number of documents that can be dated before the Arab conquest (641 CE) is limited. For unclear reasons, the use of Coptic in such documents was apparently restricted to the Thebaid. This legal Coptic follows its Greek models closely, so much so that the first will in Coptic has been described as “a Greek document in Coptic dress” (132). Fournet explains this “rise of Coptic” by connecting it to changes in the relationship between state and society and to the growing role of the church and monasteries in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the first place, he claims that in the sixth century we witness a proliferation of ways to avoid dealing with the state when it comes to the administration of justice. A drastic drop in the number of petitions and reports of judicial proceedings is the primary symptom of this shift. The courts of bishops and of great estates and, above all, private mediation take over the role once played by the governor. This development encourages the use of Coptic and, in fact, several of the earliest Coptic legal texts are private settlements between parties written by bilingual notaries or “pseudo-notaries,” that is, scribes who write as if they were official notaries. The general crisis of the state in the late sixth and seventh centuries accelerates this process. In the second place, the growth of the church and monasteries in wealth and manpower and the institutional recognition of this process by Justinian led to the “clericification” of many state functions, including tax collection and justice (146). As a consequence, we see a growing role for clerics and monks in written documentation. In the sixth century, the figure of the “notary-cleric” emerges. In Upper Egypt, this leads occasionally to the “transposition” of Greek documents into Coptic, which Fournet studies in three archives, an archive of tax receipts from Atripe, the wills of the abbots of the monastery of Phoebammon, and the archive of the bishop Abraham of Hermonthis.A question that Fournet strangely ignores here is the emergence of a parallel nonimperial church in this period. It has recently been argued that Abraham of Hermonthis was a member of this alternative, unofficial church.2 Could his Coptic (and Greek) documents be truly official legal documents, as Fournet argues, when they stem from a bishop not recognized by the state? More generally, what was the impact of the emergence of this nonimperial church on the use of Coptic? Another omission is no less surprising in this account. Fournet never deals with the uses of Coptic in the educational system. What exactly was the role of Coptic in education? Did this role change in the sixth century? And could this change be behind the shifting position of Coptic in the legal sphere?All in all, this important book is a must read for anyone interested in Coptic. I found its discussion of many unpublished or little-known texts especially interesting.