Coptic Papyrology

In the "Rise of a Capital: Al-Fusṭāṭ and Its Hinterland, 18/639-132/750", Jelle Bruning maps al-Fusṭāṭ’s development from a garrison town founded by Muslim conquerors near modern Cairo (Egypt) in c. 640 C.E. into a bustling provincial capital a century later. Synthesising contemporary papyri, archaeology and narrative sources, this book argues that al-Fusṭāṭ’s position in Egypt changed with the different policies of the Rightly-Guided and Umayyad caliphs and their provincial representatives. Because these policies affected the town’s centrality in the administration as well as in commercial and legal networks throughout Egypt, from Alexandria in the north to Aswan in the south, "The Rise of a Capital" offers valuable new insights into Egypt’s society during the first century of Muslim rule.

Comment parvenir au trésor de la lumière, où nous pourrons atteindre le repos et chanter la gloire du Dieu inaccessible? Fascinants et déroutants avec leurs diagrammes et leurs puissances célestes aux noms mystérieux, les Livres de Iéou nous en révèlent le chemin, parsemées d’obstacles et d’embûches, ainsi que les mots de passes et les sceaux nécessaires pour en déjouer les gardiens. Pour quiconque s’intéresse aux origines chrétiennes, ce volume rend disponible pour la première fois une traduction fiable, toutes langues modernes confondues, de ces textes énigmatiques et uniques, qui suscitent la fascination à la fois des spécialistes et des non-spécialistes. Mettant en scène un dialogue entre Jésus et ses disciples, les Livres de Iéou révèlent à leurs lecteurs la configuration des sphères célestes et fournissent tout ce que les âmes doivent connaître (sceaux, chiffres secrets et formules à réciter) et recevoir (initiation aux mystères et baptêmes) pour franchir ces mondes. Le manuscrit accompagne ces révélations de Jésus de plusieurs diagrammes et dessins, qui illustrent les mondes célestes et les sceaux dont les âmes doivent se marquer.
Malgré leur importance pour la connaissance de la diversité des courants gnostiques, les « deux Livres de Iéou » figurent parmi les textes les plus méconnus et négligés de cette littérature. Ce volume vise à leur redonner la place qui leur revient. Le lecteur y trouvera une toute nouvelle édition critique du texte copte des « deux Livres de Iéou » – la première depuis 1892 –, réalisée à partir de négatifs sur verre du manuscrit et d’une collation du codex original, conservé à la Bibliothèque bodléienne d’Oxford. L’édition critique est accompagnée d’une traduction française – la première depuis 1891 –, qui rend les traités accessibles et intelligibles, et de notes philologiques et textuelles, qui expliquent le texte copte et justifient les choix de traduction. L’édition, la traduction et les notes sont précédées d’une introduction qui renouvelle complètement la compréhension de ces textes. On y trouvera notamment l’histoire moderne du manuscrit, depuis son acquisition par l’explorateur et géographe écossais James Bruce en 1769 – d’où son nom de codex Bruce –, et des informations inédites sur l’état dans lequel se trouvait le manuscrit à ce moment. L’introduction présente également la première analyse papyrologique et codicologique du manuscrit, qui a mené à un nouvel ordonnancement du texte conservé et à l’identification, dans ce qu’on considérait traditionnellement comme un seul traité en deux parties, de trois ouvrages distincts, provenant probablement d’au moins trois manuscrits eux aussi différents. Enfin, un chapitre consacré au contenu analyse et décrit en profondeur les traités, invitant le lecteur à une nouvelle compréhension des textes.

The recent revival of Arabic Papyrology notwithstanding, the biography and personality of Adolf Grohmann (1887-1977) has not found due attention. This exceptional personality is distinguished by remarkable disruptions, his continuous scholarly output being matched with heavy personal crises and changes. Although far away of living an ivory-tower life, his legacy can easily be misunderstood as a typical form of idyllic Oriental studies. It is just this constricted occupation with Islamic civilization, however, that makes him held in high esteem not only in the Western world, but especially in Arab countries today, making him one of the few scholars unsuspicious to the dangers of “Orientalism”. The paper highlights biographical details unknown so far before discussing Adolf Grohmann’s contribution to Oriental Studies against the background of the recent debate of Islamic Studies in the 20th century.

An overview of the variety of textual differences that exist between the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus and the book in modern critical editions, thereby offering a window into the book's early readership. There is also a YouTube link to the lecture version of this paper, which was recently delivered at Samford University for their Holley Hull Lecture Series: https://vimeo.com/878444925/a35492dd8b?share=copy&fbclid=IwAR10Iu7HKuAjjcEcDdxgfT7XKqe2F6W6Bwb1cVHafNO0Yz6g4VhsIhXHMz4

A reevaluation of the ostraca and graffiti from the First Monastery of Apa Phoibammon "in the Rock" - known in scholarship as the original home of bishop Abraham (who abandoned the site in favor of a new monastery at Deir el-Bahari) but for little else - reveals close ties of Abraham and his apparent predecessors as abbots, the priests Apa Samuel and Apa Pesynte, to the monastic network of Hermonthis, visible in the newly discovered ostraca dossier from the nearby Monastery of Apa Ezekiel, in turn led by Abraham's predecessor as bishop, Andrew of Hermonthis, in the later 6th century.

This research represents the second volume of the series about Ancient Coptic Society and it deals with the terms referred to the multiple kinds of food and drink which are mentioned in the Coptic texts. I collected them from dictionaries and Coptic texts and also from the researches dealing with Egypt in Antiquity, and presented them here as an alphabetical list with adding some comments

Coptic literature presents the life of Athanasius of Alexandria in a different way compared to what his contemporaneous historians narrates about him. Some features of his personality was ignored, such as being a famous theologian and writer, and some different features were added, such as being a maker of marvels. Was this change intended? Was this random? Can we find reasons for this reformatting of the personality of Athanasius as it is presented in Coptic literary texts? The most recent conceptions of memory studies were applied-as a proper new methodology-on several Coptic pseudo-Athanasius texts, in order to find answers to these questions. This article presents a model for those who want to study historic figure via literary texts.

This article provides the edition of a hitherto unknown Old Testament apocryphon preserved in a ca. 4th century Coptic papyrus fragment. Its main points of interest lie in its apparent portrayal of Moses as leader of the Exodus already as a child, as well as the prominent role in the pursuit of the Hebrews assigned to the infamous Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres who fought against Moses and Aaron in Ex 7. The apocryphal legend of Jannes and Jambres is recontextualized within the framework of Egyptian literary history, demonstrating an evolution of the pagan Egyptian genre of the magician tale that is adapted into Jewish apocrypha and survives in Christianized form into Coptic hagiography. New insights on the Coptic Apocryphon not yet contained in this article will be presented in vol. 2 of More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.

Despite the fact that excavations by foreign missions are currently on hold in the Dakhla Oasis, much recent work has been conducted on the rich materials that have been unearthed in the oasis over the last several decades. In this review article, three books are discussed that came out in 2018-2019, two conference proceedings and an excavation report.

This volume represents the first booklet of a series about the ancient Coptic Society and it deals with publishing eleven papyri from the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts of Yale University, USA
I had the idea of this series of booklets which will present various parts of daily life in Ancient Coptic society either cultural topics or publishing texts.

This article presents an up-to-date checklist of Coptic magical texts. It deals with methodological issues, such as the criteria used for the selection of the texts and their classification into three categories (certain, probable and possible magical texts), and with the main characteristics of the texts included in the corpus: their geographical and chrono­ logical distribution, language and dialects, materials and purposes, and how they compare to Greek magical texts. A list with all items follows, including the basic characteristics for each of them.

The Manichaean Church in Kellis presents an in-depth study of the religious movement known as Manichaeism in Roman Egypt. Based on papyri from Kellis (Ismant el-Kharab), a village in the Dakhleh Oasis, it examines the socio-religious world of lay Manichaeans in the fourth century CE. Manichaeism has often been perceived as an elitist, esoteric religion. Challenging this view, Teigen draws on social network theory and cultural sociology, and engages with the study of lived ancient religion, in order to apprehend how laypeople in Kellis appropriated Manichaean identity and practice in their everyday lives. This perspective, he argues, not only provides a better understanding of Manichaeism: it also has wider implications for how we understand late antique ‘religion’ as a social phenomenon.

Liturgical papyri are prime witnesses to the history of liturgy and the religious and theological currents in late antique Egypt.These items from the third to ninth century preserve hundreds of Greek and Coptic hymns, prayers, and acclamations, most otherwise unknown but some still recited by the Coptic Church. Ágnes T. Mihálykó offers the first extensive introduction to the liturgical papyri, facilitating the reader's access to them with a detailed inventory of edited manuscripts and an extensive discussion of their date and provenance. She also examines liturgical papyri as the first preserved liturgical manuscripts, describing their material features, the ways they were used, the early history of the liturgical books, and their languages. She reveals how liturgical texts were written down and transmitted and locates these important manuscripts in the book culture of late antique Egypt.

Edition of a fragmentary Coptic tombstone that derives from recent excavations of the Institute of Fine Arts/New York University and Princeton in the North Necropolis of Abydos. It belongs to a group of four other stelae of the so-called 'litany type' with a certain provenance from the site, which assures a date for our stela in ca. the sixth-eighth centuries and aids in the reconstruction of some of its missing parts.

Script Switching in Roman Egypt studies the hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, and Old Coptic manuscripts which evidence the conventions governing script use, the domains of writing those scripts inhabited, and the shift of scripts between those domains, to elucidate the obsolescence of those scripts from their domains during the Roman Period. Utilising macro-level frameworks from sociolinguistics, the textual culture from four sites is contextualised within the priestly communities of speech, script, and practice that produced them. Utilising micro-level frameworks from linguistics, both the scripts of the Egyptian writing system written, and the way the orthographic methods fundamental to those scripts changed, are typologised. This study also treats the way in which morphographic and alphabetic orthographies are deciphered and understood by the reading brain, and how changes in spelling over time both resulted from and responded to dimensions of orthographic depth. Through a cross-cultural consideration of script obsolescence in Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia and by analogy to language death in speech communities, a model of domain-by-domain shift and obsolescence of the scripts of the Egyptian writing system is proposed.

Summary, with editions of some key texts, of the findings of my dissertation based on the edition of ca. 600 Coptic ostraca at the Leipzig University Library (O.Lips.Copt. II). The article explains the twofold rediscovery of a) the Topos of Apa Ezekiel, one of the major monasteries on the mountain of Hermonthis and b) of Andrew of Hermonthis, the abbot of this monastery and the predecessor of the famous bishop Abraham of Hermonthis. Both this place and this bishop used to be obscure names known but from a few references. They now emerge as key constituents in the Upper Egyptian monastic landscape and the new Miaphysite church during the later 6th century.

يحتوى هذا الكتاب على ما ورد من معلومات فى نصوص الوصايا المكتوبة باللغة القبطية التى تم العثور عليها فى مصر حتى الآن، والتى تؤرخ فى الفترة من القرن السابع وحتى مطلع القرن الحادى عشر، بدءًا من مدينة الأشمونين بمحافظة المنيا مرورًا بدشلوط بأسيوط ، وقفط، وقوص، وأرمنت، ومدينة الحِلّة بإسنا، وإدفو حتى مدينة كيلسى بأسوان

This book is the publication of my doctoral dissertation, so it contains the information contained in the wills texts written in the Coptic language that have been found in Egypt so far, and which date from the seventh century until the beginning of the eleventh century, starting from the city of Ashmounin in Minya Governorate, passing through Dashlut in Assiut. , Qift, Qus, Armant, the city of Hilla in Esna, and Edfu to the city of Kielsi in Aswan..

This article investigates how the early Islamic state developed out of pre-Islamic administrative structures. Taking the example of the Byzantine provincial structure in Egypt, the governor (duke) of the Thebaid clearly appears in papyri written in Greek, Coptic and Arabic as an agent of the Medinan and early Umayyad administration. The progressive redistribution of his responsibilities to new offices developed within the Islamic state shows how the Byzantine system contributed to the formation of Islamic administration, casting light on a pre-Islamic heritage which is often neglected in the narrative.