Note 247 — Chapter XXI · THEBES.

The bishop was for the most part right. The Coptic is the ancient Egyptian language (that is to say, it is late and somewhat corrupt Egyptian) written in Greek characters instead of in hieroglyphs. For the abolition of the ancient writing was, next to the abolition of the images of the gods, one of the first great objects of the early church in Egypt. Unable to uproot and destroy the language of a great nation, the Christian fathers took care so to reclothe it that every trace of the old symbolism should disappear and be forgotten. Already, in the time of Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 211), the hieroglyphic style had become obsolete. The secret of reading hieroglyphs, however, was not lost till the time of the fall of the Eastern empire. How the lost key was recovered by Champollion is told in a quotation from Mariette Bey, in the foot note to p. 191, chapter xii, of this book. Of the relation of Coptic to Egyptian, Champollion says: “La Lange Égyptienne antique ne différait en rien de la langue appelée vulgairement Copte ou Cophte.... Les mots Égyptiens écrits en caractères hieroglyphiques sur les monuments les plus anciens de Thèbes, et en caractères Grecs dans les livres Coptes, ne différent en général que par l’absence de certaines voyelles médiales omises, selon la méthode orientale, dans l’orthographe primitive.”—“Grammaire Égyptiene,” p. 18.

The bishop, though perfectly right in stating that Coptic and Egyptian were one, and that the Coptic was a distinct language having no affinity with the Greek, was, however, entirely wrong in that part of his explanation which related to the alphabet. So far from eight Greek letters having been added to the Coptic alphabet upon the introduction of Christianity into Egypt, there was no such thing as a Coptic alphabet previous to that time. The Coptic alphabet is the Greek alphabet as imposed upon Egypt by the fathers of the early Greek church; and that alphabet being found insufficient to convey all the sounds of the Egyptian tongue, eight new characters were borrowed from the demotic to supplement the deficiency.