The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the Abbasids

The wealth of documentary sources preserved by Egypt's papyri makes the country a privileged observation ground for the study of ancient multilingualism. Papyri capture more linguistic registers than other ancient and medieval sources, ranging as they do from very private documents not meant by their author to be read by future generations, to official documents produced by the administration, which are preserved in their original form. This collection of essays aims to make this wealth better known, as well as to give a diachronic view of multilingual practices in Egypt from the arrival of the Greeks as a political force in the country with Alexander the Great, to the beginnings of Abbasid rule when Greek, and slowly also Coptic, receded from the documentary record.

Dr Arietta Papaconstantinou is lecturer at the Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, and Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, UK

Contents: Introduction, Arietta Papaconstantinou; Linguistic identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Sofia Torallas Tovar; Bilingual papyrological archives, Willy Clarysse; Coptic or Greek? Bilingualism in the papyri, Sarah J. Clackson; Multilingual archives and documents in post-conquest Egypt, Petra Sijpesteijn; What's in a sign? Translating filiation in the demotic magical papyri, Jacco Dieleman; Early Coptic epistolography, Malcolm Choat; Toujours honneur au grec? ÃEUR propos d'un papyrus gréco-copte de la région thébaine, Anne Boud'hors; Language choice in the Qurra dossier, Tonio Sebastian Richter; Aristophanes son of Johannes: an 8th-century bilingual scribe? A study of graphic bilingualism, Jennifer Cromwell; Index.