ABSTRACT
Coptic is the last written stage of the Egyptian family of languages. It guaranteed written Egyptian a continuous existence of over six millennia. It differed from the traditional Egyptian scripts of Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic in two important aspects: an exclusively phonetic-based character system and the inclusion of vowels. Its fully developed alphabet system utilized elements from the two scripts that were used in administering Egypt during the first century ad: Greek and Demotic. This new and last version of Egyptian continued to develop over time, slowly gaining literary dominance over Greek until the Arab conquest of Egypt and then slowly fading away to a mere liturgical relic by the fourteenth century. This chapter will discuss Coptic’s early Egyptian roots, origin in Christian and Pagan circles, dialects, historical development, the history of its study, and its future.
