Studies in Coptic Culture: Transmission and Interaction

Introduction

Mariam F. Ayad

Cultural identity is perhaps one of the most politically charged issues, not only in the field of Coptic studies, but universally. In Egypt, issues of identity and place have been the subject of public debate. In some circles, it has become quite fashionable to speak of a ‘Muslim Copt’ and a ‘Christian Copt.’¹ The phrase ‘Muslim Copt’ stems from an understanding of the word ‘Copt’ to mean ‘Egyptian,’ since, the argument goes, all Egyptians are historically Copts. The proponents of this common descent theory are often individuals who are very sympathetic to the struggles of contemporary Copts and view their plight, especially in some of the poorer areas of Upper Egypt, as a rallying cause.² Yet, as unifying as this message may be, it has gained little traction among the general public.

Within the Coptic community, there is an increasing emphasis on the importance of faith and religious beliefs and practices as defining elements of cultural identity.³ That emphasis, however, is not a modern construct. In a tenth-century story reported in the Copto-Arabic Synaxarion, faith-induced abstinence from certain types of food or drink is represented as a defining factor of religious and cultural identity. In the story, a Coptic bishop is asked about the faith of a dog walking on the street. Perplexed by the inquiry, the bishop suggests presenting the dog with two bowls: one containing wine and the other some meat. The choice of which one the dog would gravitate toward and eat from would prove the dog’s religious affiliation. If the dog abstained from drinking the wine, then it would be a Muslim since Muslims do not drink. But if the dog abstained from eating the meat, that would mean it was Christian since the interaction happened to fall on a fast day for the Copts (Friday), and Copts do not consume meat or dairy products during their fast. The qadi, who had initially posed the question to the bishop, accepted this test as a practical, tangible manifestation of the religious beliefs in question.⁴

The story sheds light on the importance of food as a definitive boundary marker. While there is no set minimum number of prerequisite factors needed to form a cohesive social identity, in this story, food, or the abstinence from certain kinds of food, appeared as the single definitive element. All other elements were ignored.

Common ancestry, shared religious beliefs, language, food, and music are all contributing factors to creating a sense of shared cultural identity. Both the number of factors and the specific way(s) in which they combine to forge a shared identity differ from one culture to another, and from one time to another. There is no universal rule regarding which of these factors is most important in forming a distinct cultural identity, nor is there a specific formula to determine the extent to which each of these factors contributes to the formation of a shared identity.⁵ Cultural, or ethnic, identity is perhaps best understood as a relational process, constructed in social interaction, using cultural markers where they serve to establish boundaries and to mobilize people to assume an ethnic identity.⁶ Placing ethnic identity squarely in social interaction implies that cultural, or ethnic, identity is both situational and temporal.⁷ That is to say, identities will differ from one place to another, from one era to another, and from one situation to another as perceptions and self-definition vary.

In the story discussed above, the universal acceptance of food as a boundary marker is quite telling. That distinction, centered on dietary habits, probably did not surface, or was not considered significant, until the need to contrast one group with the other arose. That need to distinguish, or separate, one group from the other typically occurs upon contact. Indeed, it has been remarked that a group will not even consider issues of identity until it has come into contact with another group.⁸ As seen in the story, a group is often compelled to define itself as a cohesive unit, or community, not only in terms of what it is and what it does, but also in terms of what it is not and what it does not do. The process of establishing a distinct cultural, or ethnic, identity is thus ultimately a process of comparing and contrasting customs, dietary habits, ancestry, or religious practices. When such a comparison occurs, a group’s communal identity may be heavily influenced by how it is viewed by another group. That is to say that the defining cultural or ethnic attributes are not internally defined by group members but are externally imposed by outsiders. In the story, both the intrinsic and extrinsic views were quite similar. The characters of the story, irrespective of their professed faith, accepted food as a legitimate boundary marker defining two distinct groups. The consensus on food in this case may actually point to the absence of more substantive, or more obvious, boundary markers.

Invariably, as a unique sense of identity is created, it shifts and changes over time and as it is transmitted from one generation to the next. For this reason, it is important to discuss notions of identity formation and preservation through the careful examination of discrete historical vignettes that situate interactions and artistic expressions in their sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts. This volume presents such vignettes in an attempt to understand aspects of the formation and expression of Coptic identity; what constitutes Coptic culture; how a tradition was formed—and survived—over the centuries.

One of the main purposes of this volume is to initiate interdisciplinary discussion on how Coptic identity was, and continues to be, actively defined and expressed by members of the Coptic community, both in centuries past and in more modern times. As this identity could have resulted from external pressure and forces, it is important to examine how much of it has been shaped or affected by external views of the community. Although an external view of a group may occasionally coincide with an intrinsic view of identity, the external view may often be fraught with prejudice and bias. It is therefore crucial to understand how people perceive and express themselves.

Some of the essays included in this volume examine situations that indicate how much of that identity was, and continues to be, perceived and defined by others, while other contributions focus more on aspects of self-expression. Two papers (Salvoldi and Farid) present very different external views of Copts and the Coptic community, while Moussa’s examination of various modes of artistic production points to the use of art and iconography as means for self-expression and vehicles for asserting cultural and religious identities.

Almost half of the essays included in this volume deal with one aspect or another of Coptic culture during the fourteenth century ad.⁹ Although not explicitly stated in any of these studies, the fourteenth century was a time of great upheaval for the Coptic community in Egypt. By the mid-fourteenth century, the country had gone from having a predominantly Christian majority (at 80 percent) to a mere 15 percent,¹⁰ a percentage that is still representative of the Coptic Christian community of Egypt today.

As the Coptic community forged its own distinct identity, it became adaptive to its surroundings and responsive to the various pressures laid upon it. El Dorry’s paper, for instance, paints a vivid picture of a church that is willing to adapt its traditional process of making wine as it navigates its way through the frequent state prohibitions on wine consumption and production. El Dorry’s paper highlights the resourcefulness of fourteenth-century wine producers in finding the proper ingredients and in adopting alternative techniques of making wine to overcome the shortage in supply.

Richard Price’s discussion of the Coptic Acts of Ephesus, a partially preserved selection of documents, probably composed in Greek sometime during the second half of the fifth century, demonstrates the conciliatory nature of the non-Chalcedonians and their commitment to the unity of the Church and the empire by emphasizing the importance of the Council of Ephesus to church unity. Composed with an Egyptian readership in mind, this account of the Council of Ephesus documents events not recorded in either the Greek or Latin acts of the same council as it highlights the role played by Apa Victor, an Egyptian abbot, in that council. In some ways, this collection of texts may be viewed as an attempt by the non-Chalcedonian (Egyptian) church to dispel misconceptions about its desire to break away from the Church and from the Empire.

Carol Downer’s paper highlights the role of Coptic translators in the transmission of patristic biblical commentary in the first millennium ce by focusing on Paul de Lagarde’s Coptic Catena, a ninth-century Coptic edition of a now lost Greek text, which survives in an Arabic translation. In her paper, Downer discusses excerpts from the comments and explanations written by the Early Church Fathers concerning biblical events and verses. She demonstrates that this catena is helpful in understanding the culture and the ideologies of the Early Church Fathers, as it sheds light on the important issues and biblical debates of the time.

The Coptic Church’s early contributions to formative theological debates are well known and have been acknowledged and documented. Yet many of its valuable contributions to the creation, preservation, and transmission of technical, scientific, and medical knowledge remain underappreciated and obscure. One theme that runs through this volume is the Coptic tradition’s role in the preservation and transmission of technical knowledge. This theme is clearly seen in Tonio Richter’s paper, Talking about Medicine in Early Islamic Egypt: Toward a Sociohistorical Approach to the Corpus of Coptic Medical Texts, which focuses on Coptic medical texts, and on the role of the Coptic language and Coptic physicians in transmitting scientific, and especially medical and pharmaceutical, knowledge in the early Islamic period. He notes that Arabic medical texts were written with considerable contributions from the Jewish and Coptic Christian communities of Egypt and discusses medical education and whether it was academic or artisanal (based on apprenticeships). His paper includes a comprehensive list of all known Coptic medical texts, regardless of the material on which they are preserved (ostraca, papyrus, paper, and other media). This comprehensive list demonstrates that medical knowledge could be communicated on ostraca, single sheets of papyrus, or paper to individuals in search of a remedy, while the main physicians’ books were safely kept in a library. Interestingly, some ancient Egyptian medical practices, including prescriptions, survive in these Coptic medical texts.

But perhaps the most welcome aspect of Richter’s paper is his rebuttal of Leslie MacCoull’s remarks about the Coptic mind’s aversion to learning, a view that she had expressed, unchallenged, on several occasions.¹¹ Richter astutely remarks that attributing only Coptic texts to the Copts disregard[s the] socio-linguistic constraints of late antique and early Islamic Egypt. Taking into account the sociohistorical conditions prevalent at the time is thus crucial to assessing the true nature of the documentation. Richter advocates for adopting a more nuanced sociohistorical approach to medicine in early Islamic Egypt.

Similarly, Mennat-Allah El Dorry’s paper incidentally highlights the role of the Coptic Church and its monasteries in the transmission of technical knowledge needed for the production of wine, while simultaneously examining the Church’s reaction to the repeated prohibitions on wine consumption and production imposed by Egyptian law during the fourteenth century. El Dorry provides a thorough outline of the different laws and regulations imposed on wine production and the reasons behind them, and assesses whether they were applied in Cairo only or in the remote areas as well. Drawing on her original research on archaeobotanical remains from Wadi al-Natrun, El Dorry also examines how the churches and monasteries adapted their production techniques to circumvent the government-imposed bans on wine production. Indeed, the persistent, continued, and creative production of wine may be viewed as an act of defiance against the state and its dominant majority—an act that was motivated by a desire not only to assert native cultural identity, but also to cater to the religious and liturgical needs of the congregation.

El Dorry’s paper also suggests a harmonious coexistence of Muslims and Christians during the fourteenth century. In fact, her evidence indicates that Muslim visitors frequented monasteries on day trips, in order to enjoy a cup of wine and have a picnic! Such harmonious coexistence is also evident in Asuka Tsuji’s account of the Life and Miracles of Anba Barsauma al-‘Uryan. Her analysis of the depiction of Muslims in the Miracles of Anba Barsauma al-‘Uryan (Barsoum al-Erian) paints a picture of religious harmony and peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims of fourteenth-century Egypt, a time when Egypt was under Mamluk rule. In addition to providing a detailed account of the various appearances of Muslims in the hagiography of Anba Barsauma al-‘Uryan, Tsuji points out that both Christian and Muslim Egyptians venerated holy men, and that this veneration crossed religious boundaries in a unifying message of faith.

The theme of social interaction and cultural exchange is also seen in the hagiographical examination presented by Renate Dekker, whose paper, like Tsuji’s, examines the life and works of a Coptic saint as they survive in Coptic and Arabic manuscripts. Dekker’s examination of the Encomium on Bishop Pesynthios examines the biographical details of Bishop Pesynthios—a monk, and later bishop, who lived in the first half of the seventh century—as preserved in the Coptic and Arabic versions of his Encomium. She successfully reconstructs a convincing, albeit hypothetical, account of his life and times that includes more details than were previously considered, thus enhancing our understanding of the circumstances in which Bishop Pesynthios lived.

Daniele Salvoldi’s paper discusses the representations of Copts in early nineteenth-century Italian travel accounts. Many of these previously unpublished accounts are presented here for the first time, thanks to Salvoldi’s translations of the original sources. They depict a vivid, albeit sometimes biased, picture of the life, practices, and monuments venerated by the Copts of the early nineteenth century from widely varying perspectives and touch upon an impressive array of issues. The accounts are thematically categorized and their content critically analyzed. Salvoldi attempts to parse the various cultural lenses and prejudices through which these nineteenth-century Italians viewed and assessed the Coptic population of Egypt at the time.

Grounded in a belief that literature mirrors life, Laila Farid’s contribution provides an in-depth and insightful analysis of the various roles played by Coptic characters in a wide selection of modern Egyptian literature. Her analysis focuses on the portrayal of Coptic characters in novels and short stories produced in the twentieth century by authors living in Egypt. In Farid’s assessment, although some portrayals are accurate, many adopt an outsider’s point of view and fail to express the nuances of Coptic Christian religious practice or monastic life accurately. The more successful portrayals typically deal with the urban experience of twentieth-century Copts, particularly as they attempt to discuss the issues of interfaith relationships and marriage or the suffering of modern Copts resulting from sectarian strife. A discernible shift in perception is immediately noticeable between the biased views expressed by the Italian travelers of the nineteenth century presented in Salvoldi’s paper and the more subtle and nuanced perceptions expressed in modern Arabic literature discussed by Farid.

Helene Moussa’s contribution looks at Coptic icons as expressions of social agency and Coptic identity. In this second installment of Moussa’s investigation of issues of social agency and identity, she uses sociological theory as well as meticulous art-historical analysis to demonstrate how the icons of Marguerite Nakhla and other iconographers may be viewed as deliberate self-expressions of identity. Her emphasis on social agency highlights the ways in which the artists, members of a religious minority, subtly but assuredly asserted their identity in the face of a dominant population. Several symbols hidden in these religious icons are interpreted as subtle signs of holding on to a Coptic identity against pressures from the dominant majority. For her, the icons are hidden transcripts that need to be deciphered in order to understand the social and religious message of each icon. Moussa’s basic assumptions—that art is a social product, not created in a social and cultural vacuum, and that artists are socially and historically based"—contextualize these hidden messages and help us reach a better understanding of these icons.

This volume concludes with a section on Living Tradition. Magdalena Kuhn’s contribution, on the transmission of Coptic music, discusses not only the transmission of Coptic melodies through oral tradition and recordings, but also the idea that Coptic music is a manifestation of a living tradition. Kuhn’s contribution examines and assesses the mechanisms for oral transmission, its advantages and its disadvantages, and highlights the recent attempts to write down Coptic liturgical melodies. After discussing the pros and cons of oral transmission versus written notation of melodies used in the liturgy of the Coptic Church, Kuhn concludes that both means are needed to fully preserve the musical heritage of the Coptic Church; otherwise certain melodies, such as the older, joyful melody of the Tenen hymn, will be lost as time passes. Her contribution not only emphasizes . . . how essential it is to use all possible means to preserve the Coptic melodic heritage but goes beyond that to illustrate how music and tunes created centuries ago are still learned, enjoyed, sung, and preserved.

The theme of living tradition is also seen in Michael Jones’s paper, which goes beyond describing the processes and results of rehabilitating a late antique mural painting at the Red Monastery, Sohag, a conservation project of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE). In addition to discussing the challenges faced by conservators working in a living religious environment, Jones underscores the importance of appreciating and respecting the connection between visible, tangible objects of art (such as the mural that forms the focus of this paper) and the intangible values, beliefs, and practices in the past that are immediately relevant now. He urges scholars, art historians, and conservators to appreciate the icons and monasteries of Egypt not just as relics of the past, but as dynamic cultural entities whose survival today is more meaningful to their patrons than their glorious past, and to emphasize the role of the contemporary Church as a cultural purveyor.

As a Copt and an Egyptologist, I am often struck by an attitude that relegates Coptic culture to a museum, next to its more ancient predecessor. Often the connection between the modern practitioners of Coptic culture and faith and their more ancient roots is lost on scholar and layman alike. It is hoped that this volume will contribute to a continued dialogue between the Coptic community and the scholarly community whose fascination with earlier phases of this culture continues to enrich our knowledge and appreciation of it. I hope that the collection of essays presented in this volume will provide a truer, more faithful glimpse into the Coptic cultural and social identity, and the factors that helped create and shape it—that we may come to view Coptic identity not just as a matter of our past, shared roots, but also as a roadmap to the future.¹² I also hope that the readers of this volume will gain a greater appreciation of the extent to which Coptic culture is truly a living tradition.

Notes

1      See, for example, Ahmed Abdel Mo’ti Hegazy, al-Aqbat al-Masihiyun wa-l-aqbat al-muslimun, al-Ahram, October 31, 2012, http://digital.ahram.org.eg/articles.aspx?Serial=1079872&eid=1462; and Samir al-Amir, al-Aqbat al-Muslimun wa-l-aqbat al-Masihiyun, al-Hewar al-Motamadin online community, http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=282485. Ne‘mat Ahmed Foud and Fatma Naout, Egyptian authors and university professors, have similar views and have published extensively on this issue. See, for example, http://ara.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idARACAEA2G0B520140317; http://www.coptstoday.com/Copts-News/Detail.php?Id=75379.

2      See, for example, Tarek Haggi, Egyptian Copts Are: Oppressed . . Oppressed . . . Oppressed, http://www.tarek-heggy.com/English-essays-main.htm, where it appears as article #14; Haggi, Moshkelat al-Aqbat fi Masr: http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=160633; and Haggi, ‘An al-Aqbat Aktub, al-Wafd, May 15, 2012. See also Fatma Na’out’s condemnation of the shootings at the Coptic Cathedral: http://moheet.com/2013/05/24/1772419/

3      Perhaps one of the strongest statements in that regard was delivered by H.G. Bishop Thomas of Cusea and Meir during a speech delivered at the Hudson Institute on July 18, 2008. For the entire speech, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvcaL0n4KGA. See also the extended interview conducted by Rania Badawy with H.G. Bishop Pesenti, published in Al-Masry Al-Youm on November 11, 2009: http://today.almasryalyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=232855&IssueID=1586.

4      Maryann M. Shenoda, "Displacing Dhimmi, Maintaining Hope: Unthinkable Coptic Representations of Fatimid Egypt," International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2007): 587–88, quoting a well-known story from the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, Known as the History of the Holy Church, trans. Aziz Suryal Atiya, Yassa Abd al-Masih, and O.H.E. Khs.-Burmester (Cairo: Publications de la Société d’Archéologie Copte, 1948), 2:92–93.

5      See the outline of issues involved in defining ethnicity in Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex, The Ethnicity Reader, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 1–9. A good summary of the most essential scholarly debates and views may be found in Stuart Tyson Smith, Wretched Kush: Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt’s Nubian Empire (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003), 10–19.

6      Manning Nash, "Review of Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives by Thomas Hylland Eriksen," Man, new series 29, no. 3 (1994): 764.

7      Thomas H. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2010), 215.

8      Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 14–17; Smith, Wretched Kush, 9–10.

9      Jennifer Cromwell and Luigi Prada presented a fascinating discussion of their attempt to identify the ethnic background of certain scribes writing in Greek, using as their guide the grammatical and syntactical styles of these ancient scribes. Jenniefer Westerfeld discussed the attitude toward Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early Church. Likewise, two papers dealt with contemporary issues: Chistine Chaillot presented a thorough survey of the persecution of Copts from the early 1970s to the present, while Said Sadek examined the Coptic Youth Movement and its contributions to the January 25, 2011 popular uprising.

10   Donald P. Little, Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Bahri Mamluks, 692–755/1293–1354, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 39, no. 3 (1976): 552–69.

11   Leslie L.B. MacCoull, The Strange Death of Coptic Culture, Coptic Church Review 10 (1989): 35–45.

12   The idea that identities should be seen as a concern with ‘routes’ rather than ‘roots,’ as maps for the future rather than trails of the past was first suggested by David McCrone in The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow’s Ancestors (London: Routledge, 1998), 34.

1 The Coptic Acts of Ephesus

Richard Price

The First Council of Ephesus, held in ad 431, was attended by numerous bishops from all over the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, but they never met together, and the council split up into two rival assemblies—the Cyrillian council (as I shall call it), chaired by Cyril of Alexandria, and the council of the Easterners, chaired by John of Antioch. Consequently, there was nothing for the government to publish, and the two rival camps made and circulated their own Acts, consisting of the minutes of the sessions of their part of the council, together with supportive documents. In the sixth century, editors produced large document collections for the council (drawn from both sources), some in Greek, some in Latin.

The Coptic Acts are a selection of documents probably made early on, perhaps in the second half of the fifth century, and probably originally in Greek though certainly with an Egyptian readership in mind.¹ They survive only in part. We have two manuscripts, both in the Bibliothèque nationale (Paris), one of which has been dated to the eleventh and the other to the twelfth century. The older of the two gives us the first part of the original text. The other one, which is still more fragmentary, provides very little new material and is consequently of little interest. These two manuscripts were published (together with a French translation) by the distinguished Egyptologist Urbain Bouriant in 1892.² A further fragment, consisting of a single leaf of four pages, is in the Vienna Papyrussammlung, and dates to the eighth century; it was published in 1914 without translation or commentary.³ It has consequently been entirely ignored. I hope to publish a translation and commentary of it in the near future. It comes from a much later part of the work; the page numbers run from 297 to 300, while Bouriant’s best MS breaks off at page 96.⁴ The full original text will have been far longer than what survives.

The contents of this material fall into three categories:

(1) The first half of the chief manuscript is primarily a narrative, describing the visit to the court of Constantinople just before, and during, the council by a Pachomian archimandrite from Upper Egypt, Apa Victor.

(2) Within this narrative are contained a number of documents that do not survive in any other version, Greek or Latin.

(3) The text also contains some documents of which we possess the originals in the Greek Acts of the council. These include substantial minutes of the first session of the Cyrillian council (June 22), which deposed Nestorius. Both Paris manuscripts break off in the middle of these minutes.

The material in the last of these categories is of some, but limited, importance. It is clear that the Coptic was based on a recension of the text older than the extant edition of the Greek Acts, which were re-edited in the sixth or seventh century. For example,