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How Coptic stopped being spoken and why its reading had to be fixed

Coptic is the last form of the Egyptian language, and it stopped being spoken.1 Everything about how it is read today follows from that. A reading had to be settled in the nineteenth century because by then there was nobody left who had learned the language from a mother, and every reader was working from a book.23

The conquest

Egypt fell to the Arabs in 641,4 and Coptic stayed on as the language of the administration, because the new rulers needed the Egyptian clerks who kept the accounts.5 In 705 or 706 the governor ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ordered Arabic to be the language of the state offices.67 Atiya, who examines that order, says it failed as a measure against Coptic:8 “Though his injunction could not be carried out in practice, it proved to be an incentive for the native scribe to learn the language of the conqueror.”9 He puts it more plainly later: the decree “only resulted in an attempt by the Copts to master that tongue in addition to their own, which survived for some centuries in daily use.”10

What drove the Copts out of their own language

The people who spoke Coptic were taxed, shamed and pressed until most of them left it. Whatever was or was not decreed about the language itself, the pressure the sources describe fell on the Copts, and for seven centuries it pushed them toward the same door: Islam, and with it Arabic. Quatremère put the result in two sentences in 1808:

Mais bientôt les Coptes, continuellement opprimés par des tyrans également avares et cruels, tombèrent dans l’abjection et la pauvreté, et par suite dans une ignorance profonde. Forcés d’apprendre l’arabe, qui étoit la langue de leurs maîtres, ils négligèrent leur ancienne langue, qui de jour en jour leur devenoit moins utile.

Soon the Copts, continually oppressed by tyrants as greedy as they were cruel, fell into abjection and poverty, and so into deep ignorance. Forced to learn Arabic, the language of their masters, they neglected their old language, which every day was of less use to them.11

The treaty protected the churches. The tax made leaving them pay. The Treaty of Alexandria, signed on 8 November 641, bound the Muslims “to desist from all seizure of churches.”12 It also fixed the jizya, a poll tax of two dinars on every grown man, with a land tax on top.1314 A convert stopped paying it.15 Butler: “There was therefore a direct premium placed on a change of religion; and although religious freedom was in theory secured for the Copts under the capitulation, it soon proved in fact to be shadowy and illusory.”16 As converts left the rolls, the load fell on fewer shoulders, and Butler’s wonder “is not that so many Copts yielded to the current which bore them with sweeping force over to Islam, but that so great a multitude of Christians stood firmly against the stream.”17 The rules on how a Christian dressed and lived came later, set down by the Muslim jurist al-Māwardī (d. 1058): a distinctive garment with a girdle, houses no higher than a Muslim’s, no bells in Muslim ears, no cross shown in public.18

Under the Umayyads the monks were taxed and the Delta rose. The History of the Patriarchs, the Church’s own chronicle, records that about 705 al-Aṣbagh, son of the governor, “laid a poll-tax upon them of one dinar from each individual,” “the first poll-tax paid by the monks,” and “forced many persons to become Muslims.”19 Between 739 and 773 five risings broke out against the taxes.20 The worst came in the marshes of the northern Delta, where the Bashmurites “even sold their own children to pay their taxes,” then refused to pay at all.2122 In 831 the caliph al-Maʾmūn came against them in person; his troops “wrecked and burnt their dwellings, and demolished their churches,” and the survivors were deported to Baghdad.2324 The cause, the patriarch Dionysius was told, was “the extortions of the two overseers of taxes.”25

Al-Ḥākim showed how fast the pressure turned into conversion. In October 1012 he ordered Christians into black turbans and girdles, with wooden crosses hung round the neck, barred them from horses, and listed Muslims to replace his Christian officials.26 Yaḥyā of Antioch, a Christian historian who lived through it, records the result: “un grand nombre des principaux fonctionnaires et d’autres notables chrétiens embrassèrent l’islamisme; ils furent imités par une foule nombreuse du peuple” (a great number of the leading officials and other Christian notables embraced Islam, and a great crowd of the people followed them).27 In the provinces, he adds, few converted.28 Then the churches and monasteries of the empire, “plusieurs milliers” (several thousand), were handed to the troops and pulled down.29 Ishak, in the Coptic Encyclopedia, goes further: al-Ḥākim, he writes, “issued an order to stop the use of Coptic not only in public places and offices but also at homes and in private circles,” and “those caught conversing in Coptic were liable to have their tongues cut.” He gives no source for it, and passes on as hearsay (“it is said”) that mills were set at church doors to drown the sound of the Coptic hymns.30

The Mamluks finished it in the fourteenth century. In 1301 Christians were put into blue turbans and forbidden horses and mules, and Lane-Poole records that “all the churches in Egypt remained closed for the year.”3132 Maqrīzī, a Muslim historian, says Christians were barred from the sultan’s offices until they became Muslims, and “die Noth zwang eine Anzahl der Angesehensten von ihnen, den Islam anzunehmen, weil sie sich schämten, das Blau zu tragen und auf Eseln zu reiten” (need forced a number of the most eminent of them to become Muslims, because they were ashamed to wear the blue and ride on asses).3334 In 1321, during and after the Friday prayer, crowds pulled down churches from Qūṣ to Alexandria and Damietta.3536 In 1354 crowds seized Christians in the street and would not let them go until they professed Islam, and tore down Christian houses built higher than Muslims’.37 Maqrīzī ends with conversions in Upper Egypt and the north, and 450 in one day at Qalyūb.38

The language went where its speakers went. These measures fell hardest on the Copts who served the state and on those near the capital.39 Of the Coptic secretaries of the great, Quatremère says they “n’avoient plus d’autre intérêt que celui de parler et d’écrire purement la langue Arabe” (had no interest left but to speak and write pure Arabic), and that in Upper Egypt, whose people were “moins exposés à la cupidité et aux exactions des gouverneurs” (less exposed to the greed and extortions of the governors), “la langue Copte resta plus long-temps florissante” (Coptic stayed alive longer).4041 Sobhy names the cause: the spread of Arabic, تسلط الدين الإسلامي (the dominance of Islam), and the conversion of many Copts.42 Whatever was decreed about the language itself, seven hundred years of poll tax, broken and shuttered churches, marked clothes and closed offices, with relief always on offer at the price of the faith, emptied the community that spoke it, until the Copts left were the ones who had held out, and they had long since been made to learn Arabic. Coptic survived in the one place they would not leave: the church.43

The dim interior of an old Coptic church: a tall screen of wooden latticework with icons along its top
Inside the Coptic church of St Sergius in Old Cairo, photographed by the Maison Bonfils between 1867 and 1899.Maison Bonfils. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-04062.

Six centuries of loss

It was slow. Severus of Ashmunein, writing in the tenth century, says in his own preface that he had to find Copts who could turn Greek and Coptic documents into Arabic, because by then both languages were unknown to most Christians.44In time Copts wrote Arabic itself in Coptic letters: Worrell places the one long work of this kind “early in the interval between the tenth and the thirteenth century.”45

The Church turned to Arabic where its people could no longer follow. Atiya dates the first Coptic writing in Arabic to the tenth century, when, he says, “the Coptic language was still the spoken language of Egypt,” and has the church translate its Coptic books into Arabic later in the Middle Ages, “so that the congregation, who had started to speak Arabic as a substitute for the spoken Coptic, could understand it.”46Ishak puts a name to the step inside the church: Pope Gabriel II, in the twelfth century, authorized Arabic in the services “to cope with the gradual failure of the congregation to understand the Gospels and the liturgies in Coptic.”47 The Copts, he adds, started writing their own theology in Arabic in the thirteenth century.48

The grammars are the evidence of the loss. The first of the grammarians Sobhy lists is Bishop Athanasius of Qūṣ, in the eleventh century.49 Yūḥannā of Samannūd followed, then the Awlād al-ʿAssāl in the thirteenth century with grammars and dictionaries.50 Sobhy puts the purpose bluntly: the Copts saw their language decaying and Arabic spreading among the people, and so they wrote it down.51 Nobody writes a grammar of a language their children are learning at home.

It lasted longest in the south. Sobhy, writing in 1925 in a grammar published by the Egyptian Ministry of Public Education, gives the end of it: the people of Upper Egypt went on speaking Coptic, particularly around Naqāda, Qūṣ and Akhmīm, until its use among the laity ceased altogether around the beginning of the eighteenth century.52 It survived after that only in church, and Sobhy credits that survival to the patriarchs, who ordered its use in the services.53 The south kept more than the language. It kept the older way of reading it, and a century and a half later the scholars who went up the Nile to listen still heard it there: the sources compared letter by letter set what they heard in Upper Egypt beside what was being taught in Cairo.5455

When it stopped is disputed. Kasser, writing on the language in the same encyclopedia, holds that Bohairic “ceased to be a truly living language from the eleventh century,” and that its survival after that was “a phenomenon in large part artificial,” kept among the clerks of the church. He calls al-Maqrīzī’s report of Coptic still spoken in Upper Egypt “not very significant” and takes Vansleb’s with “the same circumspection.”56Ishak reads the same reports as evidence. Al-Maqrīzī, in the fifteenth century, says that in Upper Egypt women and children knew almost no other tongue but Coptic;57 the country people of many parts of Upper Egypt spoke it to the end of the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth;58 and in 1672 or 1673 the traveller Vansleb was introduced to a Muʿallim Athanasius as the last Copt who could speak it.59Traces run later still. In the nineteenth century, Ishak writes, the cantors and priests of Farshūṭ spoke only Coptic inside the sanctuary, and an old man of Qūṣ remembered his parents talking in it; but he adds, after Worrell, that such traditions show Coptic used “in spots for the glorification of a defunct institution,” not a language still spoken that late.60

The reform

The reform was a repair, and the reformers say what they were repairing. ʿAwaḍ writes that Cyril IV took up the teaching of the language by its rules “after it had all but died out,” and founded his Great School in 1853 to do it.61 The reading itself was settled by ʿIryān Effendi Girgis Muftāḥ, teacher of Coptic at the Patriarchal College, about 1857 or 1858 under Cyril IV, and the Asās, a grammar of the new reading, records it.6263 Its own chapter on why the adjustment was needed gives a reason from inside the language rather than from outside it: the old reading had let too many sounds fall together for a hearer to follow.64 Where ⲉ was sounded like ⲁ, a hearer given ⲡⲉⲓⲱⲧ could not tell, in the book’s own example, whether it meant “my father” or “your father.”65 The remedy was to send the letters back “to their Greek origin,” which in practice meant Greek as the Greek Church then read it.6667 Who made the reform, how it chose each letter, and how the Church took it is told in how the reading of Coptic was reformed.

That is why this library writes what it writes: the reformed reading is the one the Church settled on, the one its hymns classes teach and its cantors sing. Linguists such as Satzinger count it a break with the older tradition rather than its survival, though Egyptians made it with care inside their own tradition. The older reading it replaced in Cairo lives on in parts of Upper Egypt and has its own defenders. Both belong to the Church, and a learner who hears the other one in their own church should follow their church in the spirit of unity. What the reform decided for each letter, who stood behind it and who did not, is set out in how the letters are read; the sounds themselves, with a word from a hymn for each, are in the Coptic letters.

Notes

  1. Sobhy 1925, p. 3. ↩
  2. Sobhy 1925, p. 3. ↩
  3. the Asās, p. 96. ↩
  4. Butler, pp. 319-320. ↩
  5. Atiya 1968, p. 18. ↩
  6. Atiya 1968, pp. 18, 84. ↩
  7. Lane-Poole, p. 27. ↩
  8. Atiya 1968, pp. 18, 84. ↩
  9. Atiya 1968, p. 18. ↩
  10. Atiya 1968, p. 84. ↩
  11. Quatremère, p. 37. ↩
  12. Butler, pp. 319-320. ↩
  13. Butler, p. 321. ↩
  14. Atiya 1968, p. 83. ↩
  15. Butler, p. 462. ↩
  16. Butler, p. 463. ↩
  17. Butler, pp. 463-464. ↩
  18. Butler, pp. xiv, 448-449. ↩
  19. History of the Patriarchs, PO 5, pp. [304]-[306]. ↩
  20. Atiya 1968, p. 86. ↩
  21. Atiya 1968, p. 83. ↩
  22. History of the Patriarchs, PO 10, p. [601]. ↩
  23. Atiya 1968, p. 86. ↩
  24. History of the Patriarchs, PO 10, pp. [608]-[609]. ↩
  25. History of the Patriarchs, PO 10, p. [609]. ↩
  26. Yaḥyā of Antioch, PO 23, pp. [300]-[301]. ↩
  27. Yaḥyā of Antioch, PO 18, p. [10]; PO 23, p. [303]. ↩
  28. Yaḥyā of Antioch, PO 23, pp. [303]-[304]. ↩
  29. Yaḥyā of Antioch, PO 23, p. [304]. ↩
  30. cce-ishaq, vol. 2, p. 605a. ↩
  31. Lane-Poole, p. 301. ↩
  32. al-Maqrīzī, pp. 75-76. ↩
  33. Lane-Poole, p. 27. ↩
  34. al-Maqrīzī, pp. 76-77. ↩
  35. al-Maqrīzī, p. 125. ↩
  36. Lane-Poole, pp. 310-311. ↩
  37. al-Maqrīzī, pp. 77, 79. ↩
  38. al-Maqrīzī, pp. 80-81. ↩
  39. Quatremère, pp. 37, 41. ↩
  40. Quatremère, pp. 37, 41-42. ↩
  41. Ishak 1975, vol. I, p. 18, n. 6. ↩
  42. Sobhy 1925, p. 3. ↩
  43. Sobhy 1925, p. 3. ↩
  44. Butler, pp. xiii-xiv. ↩
  45. Worrell 1934, p. 134. ↩
  46. cce-atiya-lit, vol. 5, pp. 1460-1467. ↩
  47. cce-ishaq, vol. 2, p. 605a. ↩
  48. cce-ishaq, vol. 2, p. 604b. ↩
  49. Sobhy 1925, p. 11. ↩
  50. Sobhy 1925, p. 11. ↩
  51. Sobhy 1925, p. 11. ↩
  52. Sobhy 1925, title page; p. 3. ↩
  53. Sobhy 1925, p. 3. ↩
  54. How the letters are read. ↩
  55. Ishak 1975, vol. I, p. 6. ↩
  56. cce-kasser, vol. 8, pp. A145-A151. ↩
  57. cce-ishaq, vol. 2, p. 605b. ↩
  58. cce-ishaq, vol. 2, p. 604b. ↩
  59. cce-ishaq, vol. 2, p. 606a. ↩
  60. cce-ishaq, vol. 2, p. 606a. ↩
  61. ʿAwaḍ 1922, foreword. ↩
  62. the Asās, p. 96. ↩
  63. Ishak 1975, vol. I, p. 2. ↩
  64. the Asās, pp. 96-97. ↩
  65. the Asās, p. 97. ↩
  66. the Asās, pp. 96-97. ↩
  67. Ishak 1975, vol. I, p. 2. ↩

Sources

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