Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

First Advisor

van Bladel, Kevin

Abstract

AbstractThe Death and Afterlife of the Coptic Language in Mamluk Egypt. Ramona Teepe 2025 My dissertation, The Death and Afterlife of the Coptic Language in Mamluk Egypt, argues that although Coptic “died” out as a spoken language in the thirteenth century, Coptic intellectuals purposefully developed a way to teach Coptic as a classical language and thus set the course for its survival as a liturgical language until today.The Arab conquest of Egypt in 642CE conventionally marks the end of the period which Coptic studies covers. After the conquest, Arabic slowly superseded Coptic as a language of politics, administration, and finally (roughly by the end of the twelfth century) of everyday life. Although in contact situations one language often dies out within two or three generations, new texts were written in Coptic until the thirteenth century from which last known attempts at original composition in Coptic, like the martyrdom of John of Phanijoit, survive. Scholars have studied the reasons and course of this shift from Coptic as a spoken language to a language only used in the liturgy of the Coptic Church up to the thirteenth century (for example, Papaconstantinou 2012, Richter 2009) and surveyed major stages of the translation of the Coptic-Christian literary heritage from Coptic into Arabic (Rubenson 1996). Despite the pioneering work on tracing the demise of Coptic as a vernacular, scholars have not addressed how at the end of this shift, in the thirteenth century, Coptic intellectuals actively and consciously shaped the future use and continuation of their linguistic tradition. My dissertation investigates the pivotal role of the last stage of the shift from Coptic to Arabic for the survival of Coptic by analyzing the inception and development of the thirteenth century Coptic grammatical tradition. My research is based on the corpus of grammars of the Coptic language that were written in Arabic in the thirteenth century. Between the 1240s to the 1260s, six grammars of the Coptic language were composed in Arabic in Egypt. These grammars, called muqaddimāt, are the first extant examples of grammatical descriptions of Coptic. They survive in more than a hundred manuscript copies. The emergence of a grammatical tradition of the Coptic language is significant because of its unlikely historical context: Coptic was described (in Arabic) at a time when it had long ceased to be used as a vernacular and had been replaced in that capacity by Arabic. Although these muqaddimāt belong to the same genre, I argue that each individual author intended to shape the future acquisition of the Coptic language as a classical language and systematic translation methods in accordance with his own intellectual purpose. Beyond its significance for the history of Coptic, the muqaddimāt also contribute to the corpus of research on the relationship of Coptic intellectuals to Arabic literary traditions and their position within Mamluk Egypt more broadly (such as El-Leithy 2005, Parker 2013) by offering a study detailing their engagement with the Arabic grammatical tradition and integrating their heritage into it. After having surveyed the scholarship on this phase of the Coptic language (Chapter 1), I compared the contents and structures of the five muqaddimāt often transmitted together (Chapter 2). I then analyzed the prefaces of the authors (Chapter 3) and performed a close reading of the individual grammars in order to identify their imagined audience (Chapter 4). I examine the relationship between Coptic and Arabic within the grammars before contextualizing them within the social and political setting of Mamlūk Egypt and the developing grammatical traditions in other languages (Chapter 5). This chapter also traces the Coptic examples back to their sources and connects the use of examples to developments in Coptic liturgy. The last chapter offers a survey of the extant manuscript tradition of the muqaddimāt and sketches broad trends in the reception of this corpus (Chapter 6). This project offers an in-depth study of this corpus and how the individual authors have shaped the survival of Coptic as a liturgical and classical language by integrating Coptic into the international linguistic landscape of the 13th century and thus making it legible to Arabic native speakers.

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