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Coptic literature. Miniature depicting the baptism of Christ from a late 12th-century illuminated copy of the Gospels. Coptic literature is the body of writings in the Coptic language of Egypt, the last stage of the indigenous Egyptian language. It is written in the Coptic alphabet.
Coptic literature, body of writings, almost entirely religious, that dates from the 2nd century, when the Coptic language of Egypt, the last stage of ancient Egyptian, began to be used as a literary language, until its decline in the 7th and 8th centuries. It contains, in addition to translations.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Coptic Scriptorium: Digital Research in Coptic Language and Literature Corpora Read and browse Coptic texts in our corpora, including many with aligned translations.
Coptic was the vehicle of popular Christianity. At the center of Coptic Christian literature stands the historically important Coptic version of the Bible. Nearly complete versions have been preserved in two Coptic dialects and fragments in others.
An exhaustive digital Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature provides a new comprehensive perspective on the spread and development of Coptic literature and manuscript culture. This versatile tool allows detailed and focused research and correlation of chronological, regional and thematic data.
Summary. Egyptian literature of the period A.D. 337–425 consists entirely of texts written in the Coptic script. Of the earlier forms of writing developed by the Egyptians, hieratic seems to have been the first to fall into disuse. The latest known hieratic texts come from the third century.
Coptic texts include a wide range of documentary texts of the later Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods; an extensive and rich body of original and translated Christian literature (of particular importance for the early history of Christian monasticism); and unique witnesses to major Gnostic, Manichaean, and Hermetic texts.
