When the sectarian disputes common in the early Christian Church led to a split between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Orthodox Church, Egyptian Christians wanted a visible symbol of their new faith, and in the third century the Bible was translated into the Coptic language and script. The last Pharaoh was a Greek princess named Cleopatra.īy then, the seeds of the Coptic alphabet had already been sown - a version of the Greek alphabet, with several additional letters from the older Demotic Egyptian script.Įven after the battle of Actium in 31 BCE, when Ptolemaic Egypt fell under Roman rule, Egypt was still extensively settled by Greeks, so it’s hardly surprising that Greek Christianity should reach Egypt early, in the person, according to tradition, of Saint Mark. One of his generals, Ptolemy, made Alexandria an international center of commerce, art, science, and learning, with the greatest library in the world at the time. Alexander himself was proclaimed Pharaoh, and established the city-port of Alexandria. We know the Pharaohs and the pyramids we know the Arabs and Islam but it’s a telling omission that we tend to assume the one just ran into the other, and the fact we do so says a great deal about the sad fate of the Copts and their language and alphabet.The word “Copt” derives from the Greek word for “Egyptian,” and Greeks have been in Egypt since the seventh century BCE-as visitors, as mercenaries, then, under Alexander the Great, as conquerors. Nowadays we have almost forgotten the Greeks in Egypt.
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