“ Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths ” : A New International Project on Coptic Literature

The purpose of the new project presented in these pages is to offer an innovative approach to the study of the evolution of Coptic literature and, more specifically, to the corpus of writings produced in Egypt between the third and the late eleventh centuries, and expressed in the different dialects of the Coptic language. Its aim is to provide a new perspective on the cultural landscape of Christian Egypt by interweaving literary, historical, codicological and archaeological data, and producing a series of scholarly tools, till now unavailable, in a digital environment, including an archaeological Atlas of late antique and early mediaeval Coptic literature that will be searchable at different chronological, regional and thematic levels. As part of the above-described research activities and goals, a complete catalogue of the Coptic papyrus codices preserved in the Museo Egizio will be produced, as well as an edition of their titles and scribal subscriptions. The fragmentary codices in question, purchased in Egypt by Bernardino Drovetti in the 1820s, are a unique example of an entire well-preserved late antique institutional library – very likely originally belonging to the cathedral of This/Thinis& – reflecting the literary tastes and dogmatic orientations before what can be defined as the ninth-century Coptic book revolution, which significantly changed bookmaking in Christian Egypt. The library of Thi(ni)s is a crucial and transitional instance in the history of Coptic books, which saw on the one hand the creation of new codicological and palaeographical features and on the other the progressive emergence of multiple-text codices. :ثحبلا صخلم  نم ضرغلا  ،ىطبقلا بدلآا روطت ةساردل ًاركتبم جهن ميدقت وه ثحبلا اذه ىف اهضرع متي ىتلا ةديدجلا ةساردلا رشع ىداحلا نرقلا ةياهن ىتح ثلاثلا نرقلا نيب رصم ىف ةجتنملا تاباتكلا ةعومجم ىلإ ًاديدحت رثكأ لكشبو قلا ةغلل ةفلتخم تاجهل ىف اهنع ريبعتلا مت ىتلاو رصم ىف ىفاقثلا دهشملل ديدج روظنم ريفوت وه اهفده .ةيطب جاتنإو ،)ةميدقلا بتكلا ةسارد( ةيجولوكيدوكلاو ةيرثلآاو ةيخيراتلاو ةيبدلأا تانايبلا لخادت للاخ نم ةيحيسملا روصعلا رخاوأ بدلأ ىرثآ سلطأ للاخ نم ةيمقر ةئيب ىف ةرفوتم ريغ نلآا ىتح ةيملعلا تاودلأا نم ةسلس قلا ةيميلقلإاو ةينمزلا تايوتسملا فلتخم يلع ثحبلل ةلباقلاو ،ىطسولا روصعلا نم ىطبقلا بدلأاو ةميد .ةيعوضوملاو  ةيطبقلا ىدربلا تاطوطخمل لماك سرهف نم ققحتلا متيس هلاعأ ةفوصوملا ةيثحبلا فادهلأاو ةطشنلأا نم ءزجكو رشنلا رادو بتاكلا مسأ نع تامولعمو اهنيوانع نم ةخسن ىلإ ةفاضلإاب ،ونيروتب ىرصملا فحتملاب ةظوفحملا . ةيف ترشن ىذلا خيراتلاو  نحن  ةأزجم ةطوطخم رشع ةعبس ةسارد ددصب  ماع ىتيفورد ونيدرانرب ةطساوب رصم نم اهؤارش مت ىتلاو 1820 نم ،ةميدقلا روصعلا رخاوأ ىلإ دوعت ىتلا بتكلا نم ةعومجمل لماكلا ديجلا ظفحلل ديرف لاثم دعت ىهو ،م نكمي ام لبق ةيدئاقعلا تاهجوتلاو ةيبدلأا قاوذلأا سكعت ىتلاو سيز ةيئاردتاك ىلإ لصلأا ىف ىمتنت نأ لمتحملا ةبتكم نإف ،ةيحيسملا رصم ىف بتكلا ةعانص ريبك لكشب ترَيغ ىتلاو ةيباتكلا ةروثلل عساتلا نرقلا ةنأب ةفيرعت ةيجولوكيدوك ةديدج حملام قلخ ةهج نم تدهش ىتلا ةيطبقلا بتكلا خيرأت ىف ىلاقتنإو مساح لاثم ىه سيز دعتلا ةبكرملا صوصنلل ىجيردت روهظ ىرخأ ةهج نمو ةيتايحو ةيمقرو .ةيد

Preamble: The evolution and role of Coptic literature in early Egyptian Christianity P.B. 1 After three centuries of Ptolemaic rule, Roman Egypt appeared strongly marked by multiethnicity, multiculturality, and multilingualism. While Egyptian (Demotic) continued to be used as the current language, Greek was the main linguistic tool for what concerned literary production and all the bureaucratic aspects related to official affairs, while Latin had a marginal role, being the language of the cives romani (mainly soldiers) and law.
In such a complex cultural, religious and linguistic situation, despite the resistance of the traditional cults, Christianity slowly but progressively emerged.
Although there are no concrete elements to confirm the traditional attribution of the evangelization of Egypt to the apostle Mark, it is very likely that the new religion reached the Egyptian Mediterranean coast quite early and that it was perceived early on as a new and potentially strong cohesive factor. The role of Alexandria, the cultured city par excellence, with its renowned philosophical circles and institutions, was certainly determinant in this respect. 2 From the end of the second century onward, the cultural richness of Christian Egypt was further increased by the emergence of a "new", partly artificial language that represents the last phase of the exceptionally long Egyptian linguistic tradition. 3 This new phase of the Egyptian language, characterized by a variety of regional dialects, which was only later destined to become also vernacular, was Coptic.
In the framework of a Church in construction, it is not surprising that the first phase of the literary production in Coptic consisted of the systematic translation, from Greek, of biblical works (thirdfourth centuries). Egyptian Christianity, however, was not a homogeneous reality in the first centuries. Besides translations of Old and New Testament works, therefore, we also find philosophical treatises that appear to have been produced within religious groups whose doctrinal choices and exegetical practices were rather different from those of the communities representing the "orthodox" Christianity. This is the case, for instance, of the "Gnostic" and, more in general, heterodox texts found in Naǧ' Ḥammādī

P.B.
The purpose of the new project presented in these pages -whose acronym is "PAThs" -is to offer an innovative approach to the study of the above-described evolution of Coptic literature and more specifically to the corpus of writings -almost exclusively of religious content -produced in Egypt between the third and the end of the eleventh centuries in the different dialects of the Coptic language. The aim is to provide a new perspective on the cultural landscape of Christian Egypt by interweaving literary, historical, codicological and archaeological data, and producing a range of so far unavailable digital scholarly tools, including an archaeological Atlas of late antique and early mediaeval Coptic literature that will be searchable at different chronological, regional and thematic levels. This Atlas is intended to illustrate the strong interconnection between intellectual and material production, on the one hand, and geographical provenance, on the other. In this respect, Christian Egypt represents a unique opportunity, since no other Mediterranean region has yielded such a rich archaeological and bibliological documentation.
The fifth century saw the most significant religious upheavals, culminating with the Council of Chalcedon (451), which over time determined a fracture, both dogmatic and hierarchical, with most of the other Churches. The Coptic literary tradition thus became slowly but more and more evidently detached from the Greek "international" one. 7 This was when the Coptic Church was truly born. After the extremely confused hierarchical and religious situation that immediately followed the Council, the separation of Egypt from the positions of the "Great Church" increased the Copts' pride in their identity, and literature was not long in supporting this orientation, above all by means of a historiographic production.
Between the fifth and sixth centuries, both original literary production and translation of homiletic texts went on. At the same time, an interest in hagiographic texts -individual or, more often, collected in cycles -began to rise in Coptic literature, which had reached its full-fledged linguistic potential. These texts inherited the general characteristics of similar works previously translated from Greek, but now mainly featured local martyrs as their main characters. The most striking result of such a literary process, which was to continue at least until the eighth century, are the so-called "epical martyrdoms" -literary texts that strongly contributed to creating a Coptic identity through the memory of the violence suffered by the faithful. These text are all characterized by the same elements: an evil emperor (usually Diocletian), an edict of persecution, a cruel judge, a long series of punishments inflicted on the martyr, and an equally long series of miracles performed by him before and after his death. 8 The sixth century, however, was also the era of the cultural circle gathered around the figure of the patriarch Damian, who was responsible for the reorganization of the Egyptian Church after the Chalcedonian schism. Beyond the individual personalities of the authors, the literary production of this period -destined to be used at the most important moments of aggregation (masses, festivals, celebrations of saints and martyrs) of the Egyptian ekklesía -had two main aims: firstly to preserve those Greek patristic texts that were compatible with the anti-Chalcedonian choice of Coptic Egypt, and secondly to produce new works that would serve the liturgical It is hardly necessary to emphasize the fact that Egypt can be regarded as one of the principal laboratories where what we define as "book" was gradually evolved and perfected. 11 "PAThs" will study Coptic books as material artifacts (showing how the writing support, shape and layout change according to content and purpose), as intellectual products (that is as a selection and combination of texts: particular attention will be devoted to multiple-text codices), but also as ritual objects (for example as part of a "funerary kit", a sort of Christian Book of the Dead), yet always strictly relating them to their archaeological settings.
Moreover, "PAThs" will try to establish and promote a shared terminology for Coptic codicology. 12 In brief, by taking into account a large corpus of works, manuscripts and archaeological sites and interrelating them, "PAThs" ultimately aims to produce a new state-of-the-art of Coptic studies, in which literature will no longer be regarded as a cultural phenomenon independent of its material context, and which will go beyond the traditional narrow disciplinary subdivisions (especially in the fields of philology and archaeology) that have typified Coptic studies so far.
The ambitious purpose of the project is to provide a diachronic outline of the geography of Coptic literary production, which will be analyzed through an innovative and multidisciplinary approach, combining philology, codicology, history, archaeology and digital humanities, in order to explore the entire lifecycle of Coptic works, from production to dissemination and storage, in relation to the geographical contexts of origin of both the texts themselves and their writing supports.
By means of an analysis of philological aspects, dialects, style, content, scribal subscriptions, titles, and internal elements, Coptic texts will be related not only to the physical spaces where they were copied and disseminated but, more importantly, to the places where they were conceived, in order to reconstruct the identity of the cultural milieu (for instance a monastic community or an episcopal see) responsible for the creation of literary genres and specific works. This approach is particularly congenial for hagiographic and monastic literary production (for example cycles of martyrdoms, which represent an important part of Coptic literature), where ideolog-ical and devotional motifs may be extremely telling.
The most visible product of the project will be the above-mentioned archaeological Atlas of late antique and early mediaeval Egypt. It will be interactive, in-depth, upgradable, 13 and searchable at different chronological, regional and thematic levels. It will document, among other data: · the places where Coptic manuscripts have been found and/or produced, and used, with a focus on monastic settlements, episcopal sees, tombs, and urban contexts; · other works in combination with which a specific text was transmitted, in order to identify modes and ideologies in Coptic literary production, which were subject to changes (for example, the Vita Onuphrii was transmitted with different works in different periods), but also to the tastes of individual patrons; · the plausible places where the works were conceived and created, with particular attention to monastic and hagiographic production, which provide more clues for such an investigation; · the codicological features of the manuscripts (book format, writing support, ruling system, presence of a binding, etc.) and their development in relation to a specific period and a specific region; · information related to the manuscript makers and related contexts (places where they practiced their trade, places where they obtained their writing supports, etc.); · information concerning the copyists (family relationships, normal professions, times of execution).
"PAThs" will integrate into its portal the just described archaeological Atlas of Coptic literature with a relational database composed of several "tables", all of them in keeping with the purpose of creating a concrete link between literary production and related geographical and archaeological context. The Atlas will include: · A complete classification of Coptic literature, by means of the attribution of a Clavis Coptica (CC) entry to each work and each title (the latter often being created later than the work to which it is attributed and therefore an independent literary product in itself) 14 , and a stable identifier to each colophon or scribal subscriptions. Coptic colophons provide valuable information, such as the names served institutional late antique library -very likely originally belonging to the cathedral of Thi(ni)s, located not far from Abydos -, reflecting the literary tastes and dogmatic orientations before what can be defined as the ninth-century Coptic book revolution, which significantly changed bookmaking in Christian Egypt. 21 We should not forget that in Egypt the shift from papyrus to parchment as a writing support was a technical innovation that directly affected the number of works transmitted by a single manuscript and sometimes even its contents. In this respect, the Thi(ni)s codices are the latest known example of an Egyptian library entirely transmitted by papyrus codices (probably datable between the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth), and at the same time offer a rare occasion to study the criteria by which several literary works were assembled in one codex. It is interesting to note that only four out of these at least seventeen codices seem to be single-text manuscripts. What is even more important is that these single-text manuscripts do not transmit only biblical works, as happened in the past, but also other literary genres. This is the case of the Vita Epiphanii and, surprisingly, of a work of Shenoute (De iudicio supremo), a rare example of a work of the famous archimandrite transmitted outside the Shenoutean federation. All the other manuscripts are multiple-text codices containing from two to nine works and already present most of the physical elements that will characterize the last and better-known phase of Coptic books. The layout is normally in two columns, with few exceptions, and the titles always stand before the works they refer to, but only rarely mention a date. Subscriptiones (or final titles) occasionally survive, but no longer refer to the main titles. As regards their contents, the multiple-text codices of Turin show that Coptic culture was still evolving. There was a strong presence of Greek patristic works translated into Coptic in the fifth century (the so-called "classical translations", according to Tito Orlandi's classification), some apocrypha (such as the Acta Pilati), old-style works that reflect the theological controversies of the end of the fourth century (for instance, the Vita Aphou (Fig. 1), that was transmitted only by the Turin codex), some original works of the sixth century (such as Damian and professions of copyists -the latter often not working regularly as scribes -, places of copying, donors, etc., but they still need to be satisfactorily explored 15 . As is well known, the CC classification has been initiated in the framework of the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari (CMCL) 16 , but it needs to be expanded, updated, and disseminated, in order to become a completely reliable tool for standard use among specialists of late antique Egypt. · A complete classification of the Coptic manuscript tradition, involving the attribution of stable identifiers to each manuscript (or rather, to each original "codicological unit"), 17  However, the few lines are followed by an accurate numbered list of the contents of the lost book The codices that can be reconstructed with certainty are normally composed of quires of four bifolia (but Codex VI has surely irregular quires), the first four pages being normally blank. The pagination, when regular, is on each page, but there are interesting cases of irregular pagination. 22 The first and last page of each quire bear a quire number.
In sum, the library of Thi(ni)s is a crucial and transitional instance in the history of Coptic books, which saw on the one hand the creation of new codicological and palaeographical features and on the other the progressive emergence of multiple-text codices.
Our task will be to perform a structural analysis of these texts, and to define their history and the context in which they were produced, used and circulated. Van Lantschoot's correct reading of the slightly damaged toponym following the mention of the topos quoted in the note (l. 4: ⲛⲧ̣ⲓⲛ) allows us to trace the Turin codices to Thi(ni)s. 28
One of the main objectives of the "PAThs" project is to create an annotated catalogue of a number of literary texts that are particularly valuable because of their type, contents and chronology: this will allow us to demonstrate the complexity of Coptic literature and the diversity of the contexts in which these texts were produced, utilized, and circulated.
This part of the work will be based on the application of an analytical reading template specifically developed for the study of hagiographic texts, which will be recorded, dated, indexed and catalogued, taking advantage of the secondary bibliography at our disposal, most notably Tito Orlandi's works and all the information provided by the above-mentioned CMCL website. This template will shed light, mainly but not exclusively, on data related to Egyptian and non-Egyptian onomastic and toponomastic materials, to be compared with similar data obtained from titles and colophons.
A "qualitative survey" -that is, an observation of relevant topics and pivotal issues (devotional motifs, crucial historical moments, meaningful expressions, etc.) emerging from the reading when one is not looking for a specific answer -will enable users to collect other data that cannot be directly categorized in a template, but that might provide a basis for future projects and research.
Both of these operations -the application of a schematized reading template and the "qualitative One of the focuses of this work will be the monastic world, in order to shed light on the production and diffusion of specific texts. In this respect, another by-product of "PAThs" will be the study of the history of Egyptian monasticism.
The The archaeological Atlas of the Coptic literary manuscripts, the principal output of the "PAThs" project, will form a complex system whose kernel will be a series of relational online databases, which will be freely available for consultation, as well as for further implementation, and will make exclusive use of network technologies. All these resources will therefore be easily accessible and usable, thanks to multi-platform and largely available tools such as web browsers. This technological choice is aimed at abolishing any usage barrier and to lower, as much as possible, the learning curve both for experts and specialists -who, in close collaboration with one another, will increment the datasets with their research resultsand for the end users of the published material.
Although the archaeological Atlas constitutes the main product of the project, the individual archives -the archive of Coptic literary manuscripts, of the places of book production, dissemination, and recovery, of the authors and their works, etc. -can be consulted independently. This is a key aspect, because an essential goal of the "PAThs" project is to become a touchstone in everything that concerns the production, dissemination, cataloguing, classification and study of Coptic literature.
The relational databases will be encompassed in customized geographical interfaces, capable of fully representing the complexity of the collected data in dynamic thematic maps and on different levels of analysis. Generic users will enjoy all the benefits of a well-organized system of "guided tours", presenting queries capable of guiding them through the complexity of scientific research and the results it has obtained. In addition to this, more granular research tools will be made available to specialists interested in making complicated custom queries and accessing deeper and more complex layers of information.
A strict relational identification scheme of manuscripts, places, persons, literary genres, etc., will provide pinpointed links between all the entities considered. It will be possible, for example, to query the Atlas by simply clicking on a region or place -Thi(ni) s, for instance -and obtain a full report on the manuscripts found there, sites of ancient manuscript production, the names of scribes active in that place at different periods, etc.
Special attention will be devoted to similar projects.
Several international agreements have already been signed, and these collaborations will be further ex-panded, also in technical terms, in order to provide a free circulation of the linked data.