Greek Poetry and Magic as Likely Sources for Coptic Vowel Orthography

The following is a consolidation of years-long research findings, to gather further feedback in preparation for an article to be submitted for peer review.

Major portions of this thinking were previously circulated at a 2021 Egyptological Symposium of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, and in unsuccessful proposals considered for conferences in 2023 and 2024 and for a 2024/2025 visiting researcher position.

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Despite disagreement over particular scenario details, scholarship already appropriately envisions that much of Coptic orthography arose and was first consolidated among people educated in Greek but also somehow associated with Egyptian temples (e.g. Frankfurter 1998: 250-253 and 257-264; Bagnall 2017: 20-21, 24; Quack 2017: 76-79; Love 2021: 169-172).

Within this type of social context, Greek poetry and magic should also be highlighted, because they are the likeliest sources of inspiration for two underappreciated aspects of Coptic vowel orthography.

Currently, there exists a standard scholarly narrative for Coptic orthography that summarizes its creation and existence as a blend of individual letters taken over from Greek and Demotic (e.g. Lambdin 1983: x; Loprieno 1995: 7; Peust 1999: 56; Layton 2007: 1, 3; Layton 2011: 3, 12; Quack 2017: 27, 56; Allen 2020: 3; Fournet 2020: 5). Quite interestingly, this “letter mixture” narrative is attested in Arabic sources prior to the diffusion of knowledge of Coptic to Europe (El Daly 2005: 66; sources consulted in excerpted English translation). More than that, this narrative perhaps arose even earlier, as an ad hoc visual description of Late Antique educational practice where instruction in Coptic was “piggybacked” onto instruction in Greek, at least during the earliest levels (Cribiore 1999; 2011: 328). Concretely, examination of surviving school exercises (Cribiore 1999: 284-285) indicates that the additional Coptic letters were put into the alphabet after the typical Greek ones (e.g. some texts edited across Hasitzka 1990: 47-54), or they were practiced altogether separately from them (e.g. P. Kell. Copt. 10 in Gardner et al. 1999: 125-127 and Plate 3). Thus, from quite early on, these peculiarly-formed letters and probably the entire script were conceived of as a flat and mechanical pedagogical supplementation to Greek handwriting, at some point likely giving rise to that dominant “letter mixture” narrative.

Despite its long history and rough overall accuracy, however, this “letter mixture” narrative does not account for two important conventions of much Coptic vowel orthography. Namely, common words such as Ⲛ︦ⲦⲞⲞⲦϤ︦ (“from it”) not only contain an innovative vowel-marking supralinear stroke (Buzi 2015: 147; Camplani 2015: 133; Fournet 2020: 67-69), but they also use a doubled vowel to mark long vowels (Peust 1999: 205-210; Richter 2023: 12), both of which conventions are noteworthy and neither of which is a matter of individual letters per se.

As to the first convention, the supralinear stroke that indicates a preceding schwa likely emerged as a “rough breathing”-like adaptation of the poetry-explicating Greek circumflex accent, after changes in the vowel system of spoken Greek permitted creative thinking for that accent’s re-use (Mihalyfy 2021). Although its curved stroke quickly collapsed with the flat line used to distinguish things like foreign words and letters used as numerals (Fournet 2020: 68), such an origin can be surmised from occasional circumflex accent-like supralinear strokes (e.g. P. Kell. Copt. 34 in Gardner et al. 1999: 220-223 and Plate 26) and from early-ish usage that graphically distinguishes the vowel marker from the flat line with its other uses (e.g. the mid-5^th c. Dioscorus inscription from Kellia, as seen in Daumas and Guillaumont 1969: 102 and Planche XXXIII). Importantly, this re-use took place as part of broader experimentation with at least one other Greek accent mark (Mihalyfy 2021) – namely, the trema (diaeresis) adaptation found within the Old Coptic Schmidt Papyrus (Satzinger 1975: 46 and Plate XIII; Love 2023: 227, 292, 305), not to mention a minor scribal tradition that has recently been highlighted in important codicological research (P. Hamb. Bil. 1, as presented and discussed by Diebner and Kasser 1989: 26-27, 258-265, and Tabulae 34 and 35; Boud’Hors 2020: 289-290). When viewed alongside Old Nubian’s probable adoption and adaptation of this vowel-marking convention from the mainstream of Coptic (Browne 2002: 12-13; van Gerven Oei 2021: 38), this development forms a striking chapter in the history of the alphabet wherein “Greek accent marks got shipped up the Nile as vowels” (Mihalyfy 2021, pace Drucker 1995: 48, that “the development of most modern [alphabetic] offshoots, of which the main branches [include] Coptic… are well documented [and] clearly understood”).

Detail - P. Kell. Copt. 34 (Gardner et al. 1999)

Detail - Old Coptic Schmidt Papyrus (Satzinger 1975)

As for the second convention, beyond any inherent logic to doubling a vowel in order to indicate length, it likely arose as reinterpretation of culturally-available material in two partially overlapping Greek-language genres (pace Richter 2023: 12, that “duplicated vowels [are] a graphemic innovation insofar as this pattern is unprecedented in Greek”).

First, this convention most probably would have been inspired by any number of double vowel-bearing words that appear in poetry. With words like the Homeric γοοωσα (Iliad 6.373 “wailing”), historic and history-informed metric practices would often encourage analysis as two units of length (p.c., Benjamin W. Fortson IV), no matter what the contemporary pronunciation of such double vowels may have been in everyday language or during poetry performance.

Second, this convention most probably would have been inspired by magical words stemming from two historic sources: corruptions of originally-meaningful poetic verses such as the Ephesia Grammata variant ΑΑΣΙΑΝ (seen in the Hellenistic lead tablet from Crete discussed in Jordan 1992 and 2000), and “Semiticky” vocae magicae imitations like ΛΑΜΗΗΡ (seen in an amulet dated to the 1^st c. BCE, as presented in Kotansky 1994: 211-215). With such odd and unintelligible words, pronunciation imagination would be relatively unhindered, versus more-standard Greek words like ΔΙΙ “to Zeus” or ΙΣΙΙ “to Isis” with their contemporary pronunciation values (e.g. Bowman et al. 2021: 44-46, 106-108), or versus clear Semitic borrowings like Χανααν “Canaan” where encounters with the donor language could have formed a reality-check on pronunciation by reminding any listener or reader that a sound of some sort could exist between the two vowels that were written side-by-side in Greek (Barr 1967: 13-16; Steiner 243-245).

Detail - Line-drawing of a 1st c. BCE amulet (Kotansky 1994)

Although very difficult to assess based on surviving evidence, this latter likely source for the doubled vowel convention raises one possible culture-internal framing of its use: that of stereotype appropriation (Frankfurter 1998: 224-233), where self-aware speakers of Egyptian valued having their writing resemble exoticized magic (cf. Fowden 1986: 214, on the Hermetic corpus as the likely result of “adjusting… the wisdom of the East to the palate of the Greek”).

To further concretize both of these vowel conventions, although they are found together in many texts and so appear together in introductory Coptic grammars (e.g. Lambdin 1983: xiii-xv; Layton 2007: 5, 8), they can travel separately (Satzinger 1975: 46; Gardner et al. 1999: 92-93), and circumflex accents of different usage even later appear alongside supralinear strokes (Layton 2011: 14, 16), after the circumflex accent-derived vowel marker’s hypothesized merger with the flat line. Clearly, this complicated and very detailed situation demands increased, careful attention to local variation (e.g. approaches like Boud’Hors 2020 and Love 2021). Here, also much needed is research into the origins and evolution of the tick mark-like djinkim associated with the Bohairic dialect (Müller 2021: 4-5); if it is not somehow yet another Greek diacritic in origin – the Dioscorus inscription’s mark resembles a grave accent (Daumas and Guillaumont 1969: Planche XXXIII), for example – it may be a descendent of the circumflex accent, somewhat like how the Greek rough breathing diacritic substantially meandered in appearance over time (Laum 1928: 128-134).

Recognition of these conventions’ existence and likely origins also demands minor adjustments in the varied phrasings that scholars use for the standard narrative of Coptic orthography – for example, that “Coptic is written in an alphabet of Greek letters supplemented by additional signs taken from the Egyptian Demotic script” (Layton 2011: 3; italics in original). More accurate would be slightly-adjusted phrasing like that Coptic forms “a creative adaptation of Greek script with the inclusion of some Demotic letters.” For, “creative adaptation” is more accurate than “mixture”-type language like a “supplemented” “alphabet” (important changes occurred beyond straightforwardly taking over letters); and, Greek “script” is more accurate than summary mention of Greek “alphabet” or “letters” (since important Greek-derived diacritics are not letters and do not surface in the alphabet, as already observed by Fournet 2020: 67, that “Coptic did more than borrow letters from Greek; it also appropriated its diacritic signs.”).

On a related note, it would be beneficial to carefully examine early sources for any further attestations clarifying when the “letter mixture” narrative arose (i.e., sources like those presented by El Daly 2005: 66).

Also as an addendum – unless there is a body of scholarship out there somewhere? – it seems that there may exist a scholarship gap on vowel pronunciation within performance of Greek poetic meter, after the radical changes like vowel length collapse that had begun taking place by the mid-2^nd c. BCE (Horrocks 2010: 115, 118). With such pronunciation, possibilities include exact preservation of historic pronunciation; full collapse into contemporary pronunciation; and the existence of performance norms identical with neither the former nor the latter. For thinking through these options to the extent that they are recoverable, potential sources include manuscript errors and explicit reflection on pronunciation practice (e.g. something like the excerpts from Georgius Choeroboscus and Eustathius of Thessalonica cited in Krivoruchko 2023), such latter reflections being potentially locatable through database searches for keywords like Greek letter names (p.c., Julia G. Krivoruchko).

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David Mihalyfy is an independent scholar with a B.A. in Linguistics (Harvard, ’02) and a Ph.D. in the History of Christianity (UChicago ’17).

In a not uncommon scholarly trajectory, he first became interested in Afroasiatic historical linguistics because he happened to study one language (Coptic, for Christian texts), and soon realized the relative underdevelopment of diachronic knowledge in comparison to Indo-European languages.

He has presented at several Egyptological Symposiums of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, as well as remotely at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen. Several short articles from a larger project on the survival and transformation of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian were recently published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.

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