A New Coptic Grammar‪.‬

SPOKEN IN EGYPT alongside the Greek of the upper classes from the early first millennium A.D., written mostly with Greek characters instead of the hieroglyphic signs of earlier stages of Egyptian, gradually replaced in daily usage by Arabic from about A.D. 640 and entirely sometime between by Arabic 1000-5000, but never abandoned for the liturgy of the Coptic or Christian-Egyptian church the Coptic language did not have to be deciphered. That hardly means, however, that it was adequately understood by many at the beginning of the modern age. A first milestone in the description of Coptic was the Grammatica linguae copticae (Turin, 1841) by Amadeo Peyron, who strangely combined (at least according to H. Brugsch's report in Mein Leben und mein Wandern [Berlin 1894 rpt. Osnabruck: Biblio Verlag, 1975], 104) an excellent knowledge of Coptic with a denial of Jean-Francois Champollion's achievements in hieroglyphic Egyptian, in which knowledge of Coptic played an obvious role. In 1880, Ludwig Stem, a student of Friedrich Ruckert, presented a monumental summation of Coptic grammar in his Koptische Grammatik. In the six score years that have passed since then, Coptic has never again been described on the same scale, until the publication of Bentley Layton's A Coptic Grammar (2000). Advances in our understanding of Coptic in recent decades might perhaps have made a new grand summation at a much earlier time premature. But now, the codification of Coptic in its most important dialect, Sahidic, has caught up twentieth century just as the twenty-first begins. Among the grammar's many virtues, one might single out for special praise the thousand of textual examples, effectively organized and accurately cited, translated, and referenced, which afford excellent material in which to observe directly Sahidic Coptic fully in action in all its diversity. The book is the fruit of extraordinary efforts expended with increased intensity in the past decade but beginning as early as three decades ago when the author was on the faculty of the famed Ecole biblique de Jerusalem, the grammar's dedicatee, housed in the Dominican Monastery of St. Stephen just outside the Old City's Damascus Gate, and home to what may well be the Middle East's best library for ancient Near Eastern studies. In those days, the author first entered into close contact with H. J. Polotsky and A. Shisha-Halevy, whose acknowledged influence is seen on almost every page of the grammar.