ABSTRACT
This study is centred on Coptic language sources in order to look at the specifically Egyptian components of Late Antique culture in Egypt. Since Coptic did not exist in any significant way outside Egypt, its use in both original compositions and translations indicates an
audience that knew and used the native Egyptian language at a time when it was not the official language of government. The sources examined in this study span an approximately 600-year period from c. 400 to 1000 CE, a period during which the non-native rulers of Egypt used Greek, Latin and Arabic, and a time when these languages (or at least Greek and Arabic) were in common use throughout Egypt. The extent of bilingualism in Egypt in this period cannot be measured quantitatively, but is assumed by many scholars to have been great. Nevertheless, the long survival of the Egyptian language in its latest form attests to the importance of this Egyptian element in a culture that is the product of a large number of indigenous and outside influences. The Coptic sources under consideration here represent what was theoretically accessible to the literate Coptic-speaking Egyptian from the Late Antique and early Islamic periods.3
