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Coptic literature is the body of writings in the Coptic language of Egypt, the last stage of the indigenous Egyptian language. It is written in the Coptic alphabet . The study of the Coptic language and literature is called Coptology .
Jørgen Zoëga, the most knowledgeable scholar of Coptic in the late eighteenth century, made several insights about hieroglyphs in De origine et usu obeliscorum (1797), a compendium of knowledge about ancient Egypt. He catalogued hieroglyphic signs and concluded that there were too few distinct signs for each one to represent a single word, so ...
Two of the most important figures of 20th century Egyptian literature are Taha Hussein and Naguib Mahfouz, the latter of whom was the first Egyptian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Edwar al-Kharrat, who embodied Egypt's 60s Generation, founded Galerie 68, an Arabic literary magazine that gave voice to avant-garde writers of the time. [19]
The early Fathers of the Coptic Church, such as Anthony the Great, Pachomius the Great, Macarius of Egypt and Athanasius of Alexandria, who otherwise usually wrote in Greek, addressed some of their works to the Egyptian monks in Egyptian. The Egyptian language, now written in the Coptic alphabet, flourished in the second and third centuries.
The Coptic script was the first Egyptian writing system to indicate vowels, making Coptic documents invaluable for the interpretation of earlier Egyptian texts. Some Egyptian syllables had sonorants but no vowels; in Sahidic, these were written in Coptic with a line above the entire syllable.
The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, also known as the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians, [1] [2] is a Sethian Gnostic text found in Codices III and IV of the Nag Hammadi library. The text describes the origin of three powers: the Father, the Mother, and the Son, who came forth from the great invisible Spirit.
Written in Sahidic Coptic, it is believed to be written by a single scribe, and like other pieces of the Bodmer papyri, is part of a singular library containing a combination of Classical literature, Apocrypha, Biblical canon, math, and personal correspondences of the local monastery, the Pachomian Order. [1] [3] [4]
Old Coptic is the earliest stage of Coptic writing, a form of late Egyptian written in the Coptic script, a variant of the Greek alphabet. [1] It "is an analytical category … utilised by scholars to refer to a particular group of sources" and not a language, dialect or singular writing system.