ABSTRACT
I believe that it is important to try to bring together the Coptic and Greek sources for Egyptian society, because modern studies usually create a dichotomy between ‘Greekspeaking culture’ and ‘Coptic-speaking culture’. I, personally, do not think that such a dichotomy existed from the Byzantine period onwards, but feel that this misconception arises from the fact that scholars rarely specialise in both Classical and Egyptian
1 e title of this article is that of a paper given by the author at the Linguistics Seminar of the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (5 November 1997). A dierent version of the same paper, which developed the papyrological aspects and reduced the linguistic section, was given at the University of Trier on 29 June 2000. e two versions are too close to be edited as two separate papers, and are here merged into a single article. e documents of the accompanying handouts have been integrated where relevant, and annotation has been added. e original les of the oral seminar texts and handouts are on a disk deposited with the author’s papers at the Grith Institute Archive in Oxford. ere were few footnotes by the author, mostly containing comments on work in progress. ese original footnotes are marked [SJC]; all other footnotes are mine. I have kept the oral style of the seminars throughout, but have eliminated remarks and interjections that were time-or place-specic. Some of the material in this article has been published in dierent form in the author’s ‘Papyrology and the utilisation of Coptic sources’, in P. Sijpesteijn and L. Sundelin (eds), Papyrology and the history of early Islamic Egypt, Islamic History and Civilization 55 (Leiden 2004) 21-44. I am very grateful to Alison Hobby and Elizabeth
languages; and universities, museums and libraries usually have separate departments for Classical and Egyptian civilisation.
