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In the article "Two Coptic grammatical morphemes of unknown origin" Carsten Peust discusses the etymology of two Coptic morphemes whose origin has remained unclear until today. These are the n-prefix of the so-called adjective verbs and the particle ⲡⲉ, which often accompanies the preterite converter. It is suggested that both have arisen through a false segmentation of contexts in which their predecessors typically occurred. The use of these morphemes is a distinguishing criterion between Demotic and Neo-Egyptian Egyptian. [Extracted from the article]

This paper compares two areas of Egypt and Khorāsān in post-Islamic era regarding the loss and maintenance of their mother tongues. While in Egypt, Coptic was gradually removed from both formal and colloquial usages, in Khorāsān, Persian (Farsi or Parsi Dari), though was out of official and governmental services for more than two centuries, was able to finally maintain its status. The most important reason found behind this difference can be attributed to the independence seeking movements in Khorāsān (e.g. Sho'ūbieh), leading to the establishment of the first post-Islamic independent Iranian governments who supported the revival of Iranian culture and the maintenance of Persian language. Secondly, the migration of Arab tribes and the Arabization of the conquered societies were more successful in Egypt compared to Eastern Iran, which changed the demographic composition of Egypt. Moreover, the role of Persian-speaking epic poets, the social class of dihgāns in Iranian society and the fact that Coptic was not as old a language as Persian are other important reasons. It is argued that language maintenance can happen better in cases where top–down governmental and institutional support exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-interpretation of a Coptic magical text on paper from Saqqara in light of parallels from earlier Egyptian as well as medieval Greek, Latin, and Syriac ritual texts: the central motif, which refers to wind, wave, and snakes, is applied to the cure of impotence, conceived as the releasing of ritual binding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the principal Coptic dialects Sahidic and Bohairic, in which the two verbs for "to sit" and "to stand" possess just a single form each, the Southern Coptic dialects (Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, dialect P) have preserved a formal distinction between the infinitive and the stative in both verbs. This information remains hidden in a few text editions, is not widely known and not reflected in current handbooks. The present paper traces the original morphological distinction for both verbs in the major textual witnesses of the South, as well as the progressive morphological collapse that lead to the uniform shapes of these verbs in the dominant dialects. Finally, an etymology is suggested for the puzzling Sahidic standard form ϩⲙⲟⲟⲥ "to sit". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Coptic Panegyric of Makarius of Tkow describes the eviction of a pagan deity named Kothos, whose identity has been discussed and disputed since the text was first published in 1980 and most recently in APF 64/1, 2018. The varying identifications are here critically examined and a solution is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coptic pharmacological texts offer a multitude of medical prescriptions concerning various afflictions, such as eye or skin irritations, affections of the viscera, or even psychological complaints. The content of these texts is medical, and in most cases bereft of any magical or religious ideas. They usually compile prescriptions according to symptoms and/or afflictions, without any further organising principle. Only a handful of texts are grouped according to the illness or to the medicinal plants used. Almost every prescription follows a pattern, with four formal elements: 1) the medical indication (or purpose), 2) the (basic) ingredients, 3) the procedure and application, and 4) the effects and/or the effectiveness of a remedy, or further information. In this article, I give an overview of the entire corpus of Coptic medical prescriptions, explore the four main elements, and especially the discussions of efficacy. I also examine the material in light of placebo research, to see whether something like a placebo effect may have influenced how the pharmacological texts were formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the 'market of healing' of Christian Egypt (here broadly considered as the fourth through twelfth centuries CE), 'magical' practitioners represent an elusive yet recurrent category. This article explores the evidence for magical healing from three perspectives – first, literary texts which situate 'magicians' in competition with medical and ecclesiastical healing; second, the papyrological evidence of Coptic-language magical texts, which provide evidence for concepts of disease, wellness, and their mediation; and finally confronting the question of how these healing traditions might be understood within the methodologically materialistic framework of academic history, using the concepts of placebo and healing as a performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interdisciplinary research (philology, typology, morphology, phonology) presented here explores the role of gender in the meaning and morphology of Coptic nouns. Coptic has a predominantly grammatical gender system, albeit with a niche for semantically based gender assignment. The gender system marks a three-way semantic contrast between a [male] versus a [female] versus an [unspecified] gender value, even where the morphology draws only a two-way distinction between grammatical masculine and feminine gender. By integrating quantitative data and morphophonological analysis, we shall argue that masculine gender is morphologically unmarked. Although no discrete morpheme can be identified, feminine gender is always morphologically marked on nouns. Masculine and feminine nouns are distinguished in terms of their templatic structure, which interacts in complex ways with vowel distributions, stress assignment, and noun class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editions of previously unpublished texts from the monastic complex at Wadi Sarga in the collection of the British Museum. These fourteen ostraca bear writing exercises ('school texts'), primarily alphabets and alphabetic letters or sequences, personal names, and epistolary formulae. Such exercises were not included by W.E. Crum and H.I. Bell in their 1922 publication of texts from the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jena papyrus collection contains eight Coptic items (P.Ien. Inv. 446-453) belonging to a larger assemblage of Greek, Demotic, Coptic and Arabic papyri (P.Ien. Inv. 259-472) which Fritz Uebel described as „the Edfu purchase of the year 1911". Uebel took the provable provenance from Edfu of a number of Ptolemaic Greek papyri to hold for the assemblage as a whole. Of five less fragmentary Coptic papyri from this assemblage published in this article, three at least are unlikely to come from Edfu. The Coptic part of the „Edfu purchase of the year 1911" thus challenges Uebel's generalising conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O.BYU Mag., a Coptic love spell written continuously over three successive ostraca, consists largely of a narrative in which Horus asks for the help of his mother Isis to win the love of a woman whom he meets in the underworld. It is one of twenty-two known Coptic magical texts that mention Egyptian or Greek deities, and its narrative is paralleled almost exactly in three of these. Dating to the seventh or eighth century CE, it provides important evidence regarding the knowledge and survival of Egyptian deities at a time when Egypt was thoroughly Christian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an up-to-date checklist of Coptic magical texts. It deals with methodological issues, such as the criteria used for the selection of the texts and their classification into three categories (certain, probable and possible magical texts), and with the main characteristics of the texts included in the corpus: their geographical and chronological distribution, language and dialects, materials and purposes, and how they compare to Greek magical texts. A list with all items follows, including the basic characteristics for each of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late Egyptian texts are often characterized by the presence of a w at the end of words that does not seem to have any etymological justification. This w has often been interpreted as a "space filler", i.e. a sign without any real function used by the scribe to fill spaces in the text. In the present article I question this hypothesis, and I suggest instead that these w were used to supply some information about the vocalization of the word, as sort of very primitive matres lectionis. Starting from the analysis of nouns and adjectives from a corpus of selected Late Egyptian texts, my study shows that there is a correlation between the presence or absence of the w in late Egyptian words and the vocalization in the corresponding Coptic reflexes. Possible further research and some considerations about the larger implications of this system are presented in the conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hitherto overlooked papyrus in the British Library reveals how Egyptian villagers managed the payment of their annual poll-tax quota in early Islamic Egypt. This text forms part of the archive of a moneylender in 8thh century Thebes, Daniel son of Pachom, which shows him to be a wealthy member of the community who loaned money to others in need. Daniel's finances, activities, and family life are examined for the first time in light of this material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an edition of O.Col. inv. 100, a letter addressed by Frange and Moses to Matthaios, asking him to leave everything behind and to come quickly northward to them. The ostracon, which belongs to the collection of Columbia University, offers a new and dramatic addition to the already rich Frange dossier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]