Z = 68.

Z2 = 159.

CHAPTER IV. EGYPTIAN OR COPTIC VERSIONS.

The critical worth of the Egyptian versions has only recently been appreciated as it deserves, and the reader is indebted for the following account of them to the liberal kindness of one of the few English scholars acquainted with the languages in which they are written, the Rev. J. B.

Lightfoot, D.D., then Canon of St. Paul's, and Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge; who, in the midst of varied and pressing occupations, found time to comply with my urgent, though somewhat unreasonable, request for his invaluable aid in this particular for the benefit of the second edition of the present work. His yet more arduous labours, as Bishop of Durham (_cui quando ullum inveniemus parem?_) did not hinder him from revising his contribution for the enriching of the third edition of this work. In this, the fourth edition, the Editor has the pleasure of acknowledging the most valuable help of the Rev. G.

Horner, who has in particular revised the description of the MSS. of the Bohairic version, and of the Rev. A. C. Headlam, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who has added the result of more recent research. Mr.

Headlam's additions, are, wherever it is possible, distinguished by being enclosed in square brackets.

(1) The Egyptian or Coptic Versions.

Most ancient authors, from Herodotus downwards, referring to the heathen period of Egyptian history, mention two distinct modes of writing; the sacred and the common. In place of the former, however, Clement of Alexandria (Strom. v. 4, p. 657), who has left the most precise account of Egyptian writing, substitutes two modes, which he designates _hieroglyphic_ and _hieratic_ (or priestly) respectively; but since the hieratic is only a cursive adaptation of the hieroglyphic, the two are treated as one by other writers under the common designation of "sacred"

(?e??). Both these forms of the sacred writing are abundantly represented in extant monuments, the one chiefly in sculptured stone, the other on papyrus rolls, as we might have anticipated.

The common writing is designated by various names. It is sometimes the "demotic" or "vulgar" (d??t??? Herod. ii. 36, d??d? Diod. iii. 3); sometimes the "native" or "enchorial" (??????a in the trilingual inscriptions of Rosetta and Philae); sometimes "epistolographic" or letter-writer's character (Clem. Alex. _l. c._); and in a bilingual inscription recently (1866) discovered at Tanis (Reinisch u. Roesler, Die zweisprachige Inschrift von Tanis, Wien, 1866, p. 55), it is called "Egyptian" simply (?e???? ???as?? ?a? ????pt???? ?a? ??????????). This last designation, as Lepsius remarks (Zeitschr. f. Aegyptische Sprache, iv. p. 30, 1866), shows how completely the common writing had outstripped the two forms of sacred character at the time of this inscription, the ninth year of Ptolemy Euergetes I. This demotic character also is represented in a large number of extant papyri of various ages.

These two modes of writing, however-the sacred and the vulgar-besides the difference in external character exhibit also two different languages, or rather (to speak more correctly) two different forms of the same language.

Of ancient writers indeed the Egyptian Manetho alone mentions the existence of two such forms (Joseph. c. Ap. i. 14), saying that in the word _Hyksos_ the first syllable is taken from "the sacred tongue" (t??

?e??? ???ssa?), the second from the "common dialect" (t?? ??????

d???e?t??): but this solitary and incidental notice is fully borne out by the extant monuments. The sacred character, whether hieroglyphic or hieratic, presents a much more archaic type of the Egyptian language than the demotic, differing from it very considerably, though the two are used concurrently. The connexion of the two may be illustrated by the relation of the Latin and the Italian, as the ecclesiastical and vulgar tongues respectively of mediaeval Italy. The sacred language had originally been the ordinary speech of Egypt; but having become antiquated in common conversation it survived for sacred uses alone. Unlike the Latin however, it retained its archaic written character along with its archaic grammatical forms. (_See_ Brugsch, De Natura et Indole Linguae Popularis Aegyptiorum, Berlin, 1850, p. 1 sq.)

The earliest example of this demotic or enchorial or vulgar writing belongs to the age of Psammetichus (the latter part of the seventh century B.C.); while the latest example of which I have found a notice must be referred to some time between the years A.D. 165-169, as the titles (Armeniacus, Parthicus, &c.) given to the joint sovereigns M. Aurelius and L. Verus show(94). During the whole of this period, comprising more than eight centuries, the sacred dialect and character are used concurrently with the demotic.

The term _Coptic_ is applied to the Egyptian language as spoken and written by Christian people and in Christian times. It is derived from the earliest Arabic conquerors of Egypt, who speak of their native Christian subjects as Copts. No instance of this appellation is found in native Coptic writers, with one very late and doubtful exception (Zoega, Catal., p. 648). Whence they obtained this designation, has been a subject of much discussion. Several theories which have been broached to explain the word will be found in J. S. Assemani, Della Nazione dei Copti, &c., p. 172 (printed in Mai, Script. Vet. Coll., V. P. 2), and in Quatremere, Recherches Critiques et Historiques sur la Langue et la Litterature de l'egypte, Paris, 1808, p. 30 sq. A very obvious and commonly adopted derivation is that which connects it with the town Coptos in Upper Egypt; but as this place was not at that time prominent or representative, and did not lie directly across the path of the Arab invaders, no sufficient reason appears why it should have been singled out as a designation of the whole country. In earlier ages, however, it seems to have been a much more important place, both strategically and commercially (_see_ Brugsch, Die Geographie des alten agyptens, i. p. 200; Egypt under the Pharaohs, i. p.

212 sq., Eng. trans.). Even as late as the Roman epoch Strabo (xvii. p.

815) describes it as "a city with a mixed population of Egyptians and Arabians" (p???? ?????? ????pt??? te ?a? ?????), and elsewhere (xvi. p.

781) he mentions it as a station of Egyptian traffic with Arabia and India. Possibly therefore this Arabic name for the Egyptians is a survival of those early times. On the whole, however, it seems more probable that the Arabic word is a modification of the Greek ????pt??? (Schwartze, Das alte Aegypten, i. p. 956). [And this derivation seems now to be generally accepted, the Greek word a???pt??? being represented in Coptic by ???????, or ????????, whence came _Qibt_ (the common form) and our _Coptic_.

(Stern, Koptische Grammatik, p. 1.)]

From this account it will appear that the Coptic, as a language, cannot differ materially from the demotic. As a matter of fact the two are found on examination to represent two successive stages of the same language-a result which history would lead us to anticipate. But while the language is essentially the same, the character of the writing is wholly different.

The demotic character was derived ultimately from the hieroglyphic. Hence it represents the same medley of signs. Only a small number are truly alphabetic, i.e. denote each a single sound. Others represent syllables.

Others again, and these a very large number, are not phonetic at all, but pictorial. Of these pictorial or ideographic signs again there are several kinds; some represent the thing itself directly; others recall it by a symbol; others again are determinative, i.e. exhibit the class or type, to which the object or action belongs. It is strange that this very confused, cumbrous, and uncertain mode of writing should have held its ground for so many centuries, while all the nations around employed strictly phonetic alphabets; but Egypt was proverbially a land of the past, and some sudden shock was necessary to break up a time-honoured usage like this and to effect a literary revolution. This moral earthquake came at length in Christianity. Coincidently with the evangelization of Egypt and the introduction of a Christian literature, we meet with a new and strictly phonetic alphabet. This new Egyptian or Coptic alphabet comprises thirty letters, of which twenty-four are adopted from the Greek alphabet, while the remaining six, of which five represent sounds peculiar to the Egyptian language and the sixth is an aspirate, are signs borrowed from the existing Egyptian writing. If there is no direct historical evidence that this alphabet was directly due to Christianity, yet the coincidence of time and historic probability generally point to this. The Christians indeed had a very powerful reason for changing the character, besides literary convenience. The demotic writing was interspersed with figures of the Egyptian deities, used as symbolic or alphabetical signs. It must have been a suggestion of propriety, if not a dictate of conscience, in translating and transcribing the Scriptures to exclude these profane and incongruous elements from the sacred text.

The date at which this important change was introduced into Egyptian writing has been a matter of much dispute. If it is correctly attributed to Christian influences, the new alphabet must have been coeval with the birth of a native Christian literature in Egypt. The earliest extant remains of such a literature, to which we can fix a date with any certainty, are the Epistles of St. Antony (who was born about the middle of the third century) to Athanasius and Theodore; but, as we shall see presently, one or both of the two principal Egyptian versions must have been already in common use at this time. Indeed, if the date assigned to a recently discovered writing be correct, the introduction of the new character was much earlier than this. On the back of a papyrus in the British Museum, containing the Funeral Oration of Hyperides, is a horoscope in Greek and Egyptian, the latter written in Greek characters, with the additional six letters almost, though not quite, identical with the forms in the ordinary Coptic alphabet. Mr. C. W. Goodwin, who describes this important document in Chabas, "Melanges egyptologiques,"

2me serie, p. 294 sq., and in the "Zeitschrift fur Aegyptische Sprache,"

vi. p. 18 sq., February, 1868, calculates (though he does not speak confidently) that it is the horoscope of a person born A.D. 154(95).

Any account of the Coptic dialects must start from the well-known passage in the Copto-Arabic grammar of Athanasius, bishop of Kos in the Thebaid, who flourished in the eleventh century. "The Coptic language," he writes, "is divided into three dialects; that is to say, the Coptic dialect of Misr, which is the same as the _Sahidic_; the _Bohairic_(96), which gets its name from the province of Bohairah; and the _Bashmuric_ in use in the region of Bashmur. At the present time only the Bohairic and Sahidic continue to be used. These different dialects are derived from one and the same language" (quoted in Quatremere, Sur la Langue &c., p. 20 sq.). For the present I will dismiss the Bashmuric, as it will require further investigation hereafter. The remaining two, the Bohairic and Sahidic, were the principal dialects of the language, being spoken in Lower and Upper Egypt respectively; and are largely represented in extant remains of biblical and ecclesiastical literature(97).

The Sahidic and Bohairic dialects are well defined and separate from each other. Among other distinctive features the Sahidic delights in the multiplication of vowels as compared with the Bohairic; thus it has ??????? for ?????, ????? for ???, ??????? for ??????, ?????? for ?????, &c. Again the Sahidic has smooth-breathings where the Bohairic has aspirates, e.g. ???? for ???? "heavens," ??? for ???? "wind"; and it substitutes the simple aspirate for the stronger guttural, e.g. ??? for ??? "life," ??? for ??? "rend." Besides these more general distinctions, the two dialects have special peculiarities, not only in their grammatical forms, but even in their ordinary vocabulary; thus Sah. ??? for Boh. ? "to go," Sah. ?? for Boh. ??? "manner," Sah. ??? for Boh. ??? "a multitude,"

"many," and so forth. Indeed the relations of the Sahidic and Bohairic dialects to each other may be fairly illustrated, as will have appeared from these facts, by the relation of the Ionic and Attic, though the differences in the Egyptian dialects are greater than in the Greek. Like the Attic, the Bohairic is the more literary and cultivated dialect of the two.

The demotic writing does not give the slightest indication that there were different dialects of the spoken language (_see_ Brugsch, Grammaire Demotique, p. 10). In the Coptic, i.e. Christian, literature we learn this fact for the first time; and yet in the earliest age of this literature the dialects are found to be fully developed. Brugsch, however, has shown (De Natura &c., p. 10) that transcriptions of several Egyptian words into Greek in the age of the Ptolemies occur in two different forms, which correspond fairly to the two dialects; and indeed it would seem probable that the separation of the Bohairic and Sahidic should be ascribed to the more remote time, when these regions formed separate kingdoms. The older Egyptian writing, whether sacred or demotic, would obscure the distinction of dialects, partly from a conservative fondness for time-honoured modes of representation, but chiefly owing to the nature of the character itself. Thus this character makes no provision for the nicer distinction of the vowel-sounds, while the dialectic differences depend very largely on the divergent vocalization. Thus again it sometimes represents allied consonants, such as _l_ and _r_, by the same sign; while one of the most striking peculiarities of dialect is the common substitution of _l_ in the dialect of the Fayoum for _r_ in the Sahidic and Bohairic, as e.g. ??? for ??? "wine," ????? for ????? "year," ???? for ???? "weeping," and the like.

Of the time when the Scriptures were translated into the two principal dialects of Egypt no direct record is preserved. Judging, however, from the analogy of the Latin and Syriac and other early versions, and indeed from the exigencies of the case, we may safely infer that as soon as the Gospel began to spread among the native Egyptians who were unacquainted with Greek, the New Testament, or at all events some parts of it, would be translated without delay. Thus we should probably not be exaggerating, if we placed one or both of the principal Egyptian versions, the Bohairic and the Sahidic, or at least parts of them, before the close of the second century(98). There are, so far as I am aware, no phenomena whether of text or of interpretation in either, which are inconsistent with this early date. Somewhat later than this we meet with notices which certainly presuppose the common use of a native version or versions of the Scriptures. Quatremere (Sur la Langue &c., p. 9 sq.) and Schwartze (Das alte Aegypten, p. 956 sq.) have collected a number of such notices, from which we may gather that it was the exception and not the rule, when a native Egyptian bishop or monk in the early centuries could speak the Greek language besides his own. Thus for instance St. Antony, who was born about the year 250, could only speak his native tongue, and in conversing with Greeks was obliged to use an interpreter (Athan., Vit. Ant. 74; Hieron., Vit. Hilar. 30; Pallad., Hist. Laus. 26). His own letters, of which fragments are extant, were written in Egyptian. Yet he was a son of Christian parents, and as a boy listened constantly to the reading of the Scriptures (Athan., _l. c._, -- 1). When only eighteen or twenty years old, we are told, he was powerfully influenced by hearing the Gospel read in church (---- 2, 3); and throughout his life he was a diligent reader and expositor of the Scriptures. Indeed it is quite plain from repeated notices, that the Scriptures in the Egyptian tongue were widely circulated and easily accessible at this time (_see_ esp. -- 16 ??e?e? a?t??? [i.e.

t??? ??a????] t? ????pt?a?? f??? ta?ta; t?? ?? ??af?? ??a??? e??a? p???

d?das?a??a? ?.t.?.). Again his contemporary Theodore, a famous abbot to whom one of his letters is addressed, was equally ignorant of any language but his own, and had to use an interpreter in speaking with strangers and Alexandrians (Sahid. MS. clxxvii in Zoega, Catal., p. 371). The notices of Theodore's master Pachomius, the founder of Egyptian monasteries, point in the same direction. This famous person, who was converted as a young man in the early years of the fourth century, was till late in life unacquainted with any language but his own. Receiving a visit from an Alexandrian, another Theodore, he assigned to him as his companion and interpreter a monk who could speak Greek. After some time he himself applied himself to the study of this language that he might be able to converse with his new friend (Zoega, p. 77 sq., and references in Quatremere, Sur la Langue &c, p. 12). Pachomius drew up rules for the guidance of his monastery in the Egyptian language. These rules, which are extant in Greek and Latin translations (Migne, Patrol. Graec., xl. p. 947; Hieron., Op., ii. p. 53 sq.), demand a very diligent study of the Scriptures from the brethren, even from novices before admission into the order. Again and again directions are given relating to the use of manuscripts. These notices indeed refer chiefly to the Thebaid, which was the great seat of the Egyptian monasteries; but the first part of St.

Antony's life was spent in the monasteries of Alexandria, and it was only later that he retired to the Thebaid (Athan., Vit. Ant. 49). Though probably more common in Lower than in Upper Egypt, the knowledge of Greek was even there an accomplishment denied to a large number of native Christians. Thus for instance, when Palladius visited John of Lycopolis, an abbot of the Nitrian desert, he found his knowledge of Greek so slight that he could only converse through an interpreter (Hist. Laus. 43).

These, it will be remembered, are the most prominent names among the Egyptian Christians; and from such examples it must be plain that the ordinary monk would be wholly dependent on a native version for his knowledge of the Scriptures. Yet the monks swarmed both in Upper and Lower Egypt at this time. Palladius reckons as many as 7,000 brethren under Pachomius in the Tabennitic monastery (Hist. Laus. 38; comp. Hieron., Praef. in Reg. Pach. 2, ii. p. 54), while Jerome states that close upon 50,000 would assemble together at the chief monastery of the order to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord's Passion (ib. -- 7). After all allowance made for exaggeration, the numbers must have been very great.

Even at a much later date the heads of the Egyptian Church were often wholly dependent on their native tongue. At the Robber Synod of Ephesus (A.D. 449) Calosirius, bishop of Arsinoe, spoke and signed through his deacon, who acted as interpreter (Labb., Conc. iv. p. 1119, 1179, 1188, ed. Colet.). And again two years later, when Dioscorus of Alexandria started for the Council of Chalcedon, he was accompanied by one Macarius, bishop of Tkou, a man of some note in his day, who could not be made to understand a word of Greek (Memph. MS. liv, in Zoega, Catal., p. 99).

[The above was the most complete account of the dialects of the Coptic language and of the early history of the Coptic versions at the time when it was written; but in the last ten years immense additions have been made to our knowledge-additions which have rather complicated than solved the problem. These have been mainly due to the process of new discovery and to the labour of many scholars. A large number of previously unedited Coptic MSS. have been published; many new MSS. have been discovered, and the grammar of the language has been studied with great minuteness. The credit of the discovery and editing of new MSS. must be largely given to the energy and industry of the French school at Cairo, and especially to a former member of it, M. Amelineau, who has published a very large number of texts; the advances in our knowledge of the grammar are due to the labours of the German school of Egyptologists, notably Stern, Erman, and Steindorff. More important in some ways has been the discovery of an immense number of documents of a completely new class, written on papyrus, partly in and near the Fayoum, but also throughout the whole of Upper Egypt. These documents present us with the language in an earlier stage than we had previously known, and in a class of writings such as letters, contracts, and other legal documents, which conform to the spoken language of different parts of Egypt(99).

It is on the subject of the Egyptian dialects that our views have been most modified. We have seen that three dialects in all are mentioned by Athanasius of Cos: the Bohairic, the Sahidic, and a third, the Bashmuric.

When therefore fragments of a third version of the Scriptures were discovered, the name Bashmuric was at once assigned to them. The early history of the discussions on this dialect were admirably summed up by Bishop Lightfoot. (3rd edition, pp. 401-403.)]

The first fragment, 1 Cor. ix. 9-16, was published at Rome in 1789 by Giorgi, from a MS. in the Borgian Museum, in the work which has been already mentioned. He designated it Bashmuric, and, as the dialect presents affinities to both the Bohairic and Sahidic, he assigned to it a corresponding locality. Herodotus (ii. 42) mentions the inhabitants of the Ammonian Oasis as speaking a language intermediate between the Egyptian and Ethiopian; and on the strength of this passage, combined with the phenomena just mentioned, Giorgi placed Bashmur in this region, deriving the word from the Coptic ?????? "the region beyond," i.e. west of the Nile, and gave the dialect a second name _Ammonian_ (p. lxviii sq.). In the same year Munter in his work on the Sahidic dialect (_see_ above, p.

393), published this same fragment independently at Copenhagen. He had not seen Giorgi's work, but adopted provisionally his name Ammonian, of which he had heard, while at the same time he stated his own opinion that the variations of form are too slight to constitute a separate dialect (p.

76). In 1808 appeared Quatremere's work, to which I have more than once alluded. In it he included another fragment of this dialect (Baruch iv.

22-v. 22, and Epist. Jerem.), from a MS. in the Imperial Library of Paris.

At the same time he pointed out that the passage in Herodotus will not bear the interpretation put upon it by Giorgi, and that, as a matter of fact, the Ammonians speak not a Coptic, but a Berber dialect. He also refuted Giorgi's opinion about the position of Bashmur, and showed conclusively (p. 147 sq.) from several notices in Arabic writers that this region must be placed in the Delta. In a later work (Memoires Geographiques et Historiques sur l'egypte, i. p. 233, 1811) he identified it more definitely with Elearchia, the country of the Bucoli, that fierce and turbulent race of herdsmen, who, living in the marshy pasture land and protected by the branches of the Nile, gave so much trouble to their Persian, Greek, and Roman rulers successively (_see_ Engelbreth, p. x).

The defiant attitude, which in earlier times these Bucoli assumed towards their successive masters, was maintained to the end by the Bashmurites towards their Arab conquerors. While the other Copts succumbed and made terms, they alone stubbornly resisted. At length the Arab invaders were victorious, and the Bashmuric race was extirpated. It would seem, therefore, that Bashmur is the Arabic modification of the Coptic ???????, "regio cincta," the country girdled by the Nile.

But this being so, Quatremere, looking at the linguistic character of these fragments, denies that they belong to the Bashmuric dialect at all; and suggests for them a locality which will explain their affinities to both the Bohairic and Sahidic, assigning them to the Great and Little Oasis, and accordingly designating them _Oasitic_. In 1810 Zoega's "Catalogus," a posthumous work, appeared, in which he published all the fragments of this third Egyptian dialect found in the Borgian collection, comprising (besides a portion of Isaiah) John iv. 28-53; 1 Cor. vi. 19-ix.

16; xiv. 33-xv. 35; Eph. vi. 18-24; Phil. i. 1-ii. 2; 1 Thess. i. 1-iii.

6; Heb. v. 5-9; v. 13-vi. 8-11; 15-vii. 5, 8-13; 16-x. 22, nearly all of these passages being more or less mutilated. And in the following years these same passages were edited by Engelbreth (Fragmenta Basmurico-Coptica Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Havniae, 1811), who had not seen Zoega's edition. Both Zoega and Engelbreth, though agreeing with Quatremere in the position of Bashmur (the former without having seen Quatremere's book), yet claimed these fragments as Bashmuric.

In this opinion there is good reason for acquiescing. It seems highly improbable that Athanasius of Kos, a Christian bishop, can have been ignorant of a dialect so important that the Christian Scriptures were translated into it (for the various fragments oblige us to suppose a complete version of the Old and New Testaments), a dialect moreover which, on Quatremere's hypothesis, was spoken not so very far from his own neighbourhood. And on the other hand it is not very probable that all traces of a dialect which was known to him should have perished, as would be the case if these fragments are not Bashmuric(100). To counterbalance this twofold difficulty involved in Quatremere's hypothesis, the linguistic objections ought to be serious indeed. But until we are better acquainted with the early history of Egypt than we are ever likely to be, it will be impossible to say why the Bashmuric dialect should not be separated geographically from the Sahidic by a dialect like the Bohairic with which it has fewer, though still some special affinities. The interposition of an Ionic between two Dorian races in Greece will show the insecurity of this mode of argument.

[We must now continue the history. Although Bishop Lightfoot summed up in favour of the theory which would assign these fragments to the Bashmuric, his acuteness had noticed the difficulties which would be involved in the separation of that dialect from the Sahidic, with which it had close affinities by what was then called the Memphitic. The greater knowledge of Egyptian history, which he desired but did not hope for, has become possible. And the objection is supported.

In 1878 Stern examined the history and character of the third Egyptian dialect (Z. A. S. 16, 1878, p. 23), and showed that it was almost impossible on either linguistic or historical grounds to assign it to the district of Bashmur. He pointed out that all the fragments we possessed of it had come from Upper Egypt, that we had positive evidence that there was no version of the Scriptures in the Bashmuric dialect, and that in dialectic affinities it was clearly akin to Sahidic. He also found evidence in Tuki of the existence of another dialect there called Memphiticus Alter, and that this was supported by papyrus documents which came from the site of Memphis (_see_ below), which have some, although not a complete, resemblance to the Bashmuric fragments. Hence he concluded that the third dialect was Middle Egyptian, and, guided by two or three words on a fragment of papyrus brought from the Fayoum, he decided that that district must have presented the characters of isolation and independence, which would make the development of a third dialect possible. The proof of his theory was not long to seek. Already in the year 1877 attention had been called to the fragments now known as the Fayoum papyri, and very soon they began to appear in European libraries; it was not long before Berlin and Vienna acquired very large collections.

An examination of the Coptic papyri in these collections has proved conclusively the truth of Stern's conclusions. The vast majority of these present the same dialectic affinities as the third Bible translation, and show also (as these had hinted) that the orthography of the dialect was not fixed, in fact that hardly two documents present exactly the same linguistic character, although all are definitely distinguished from the other two dialects. It may therefore be confidently asserted that all the literature hitherto published as Bashmuric is in the dialect of the Fayoum.

But the discoveries do not stop here. As early as 1876 M. E. Revillont had published (Papyrus Coptes, 1876, p. 103) a collection of documents in the Louvre which came from the Monastery of Abba Jeremias, close to the Serapeum, near the site of the ancient Memphis. These were examined by Stern (Z. A. S. 23, 1885, p. 145 sq.), who shows that here we have again a different dialectic form. It has affinities to the Sahidic, affinities to the Bohairic, and affinities to the Fayoum dialect. It represents in fact the language of ancient Memphis, and an attempt has been made to call it Memphitic, but this would create endless confusion. Stern suggests Lower Sahidic (Unter Sahidisch), but the name Middle Egyptian is the one which has been generally adopted. It is this discovery that shows the necessity of avoiding the term Memphitic for the principal Egyptian version, and substituting the Arabic name 'Bohairic.' That was the language of the province on the sea-coast in the neighbourhood of Alexandria. And it was not until the eleventh century, and the removal of the Patriarchate to Cairo, that it became the language of the district of Memphis, that is, long after the decline of Memphis had begun.

But our knowledge of the dialects of Egypt was still further to be extended. About ten years ago excavations were undertaken by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in the Coptic Cemetery of Akhmim, the ancient Chemnis or Panopolis in Upper Egypt. Amongst the results of this discovery were the Apocryphal fragments, which have created a considerable sensation lately. These seem to have been considered by their discoverers to possess so little interest, that they were only accidentally given to the world seven years afterwards. The Coptic fragments were more fortunate, and in 1884 M. Bouriant, head of the French School at Cairo, published considerable fragments of the Old Testament, including a hitherto unknown Apocryphal work, the Testament of Sophonias (Zephaniah), in a fifth dialect, to which, for some reason, he at the time gave the name of Bashmuric (Memoires, i. 1884, p. 243). This dialect was examined by Stern (Z. A. S. 24, 1886, p. 129), who showed that, while its affinities were with the Middle Egyptian or Lower Sahidic, it represented a more primitive stage in the language, and that these documents are our oldest literary remains of the Coptic language.

In the place then of the two or three dialects known until recent years, we have now at least five: the Bohairic, Sahidic, Fayoumic, Middle Egyptian, and Akhmimic, not to speak of the Bashmuric, in which no literary remains exist. The exact relations of these dialects to one another have not yet been satisfactorily worked out, and the problem is complicated by the fact that most of them had no fixed or standard form, and that papyri (especially those containing documents in the popular speech) vary in every locality and every age. To write the history then of these dialects and of the New Testament in them is not at present possible; but the following may suggest some more or less tentative conclusions.

In the earlier stages of the Egyptian language as we have it now in a written form, there are apparently no certain signs of dialectic variations, although there is certainly evidence that such did exist in the spoken language; and the changes introduced by Christianity are of great interest. The old language was fixed and definite in its orthography, and it represented the traditions of a caste of scribes, and not of the popular speech. Christianity on the other hand was in Egypt a great popular movement; a new and simple alphabet became necessary; the Scriptures were translated, not into the literary language, but into that of the people; and the copies of these translations in each locality reflected the local peculiarities of speech which had existed for centuries, but which up to that time had left behind no literary memorial.

Gradually, however, the Christian Church created for itself literary traditions, and a tendency towards unification set in round three centres, the monasteries of the Natron Lakes, the great home of monastic life in Lower Egypt, the monasteries of the Fayoum, and the great White Monastery Deir Amba Shenoudah near Sohag in Upper Egypt. Hence came the three dialects which have a more or less literary character. Then began the decay of the Coptic language. First the dialect of the Fayoum died out, then the Sahidic, until finally Bohairic became, as it is now, the church language of the whole country.

The relation of these changes to the history of the versions has not yet been satisfactorily worked out. It has been sufficiently proved that translations into Coptic existed in the third century, very probably in the second; but in what dialect they were made, and what relation they bore to the existing translations, has not yet been discovered, and the problem remains unsolved.]

(2) The Bohairic Version(101).