This collection of essays adds to the growing field of study of language change and language interaction in Egypt. The impetus for the publication came from lectures given by Willy Clarysse and Sofia Torallas Tovar in 2005, and from seminar presentations by Sarah J. Clackson. Essays were added in order to present evidence for multilingualism over the entire period in question. The quality of research and analysis presented in these essays is generally very high, though some aspects of the publication format make the volume a bit hard to use. All essays but one are written in English, though this is not the first language of certain contributors, and thus some editorial polishing would have been helpful. But these details do not seriously detract from the overall quality of this collection.
Important work in this field has been published in the last decade, and the pace of research is increasing. J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (2003), set a standard for research in this area and is frequently cited in the essays in this collection, as are the reference works, The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology (2009) and Egypt in the Byzantine World (2007), both edited by Roger Bagnall. Both reference works have chapters dealing with language usage in Egypt. Another recently published collection of essays, From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East, edited by H. Cotton et al. (2009), is similar in scope to the collection reviewed here, and has some of the same contributors.
The volume is divided into three parts. An introductory essay by the editor, Arietta Papaconstantinou, and a somewhat different introduction to the topic, by Sofia Torallas Tovar, lead off. Part One, Evidence for a Multilingual Society: Documents and Archives, follows with three essays (Clarysse, Clackson, and Sijpesteijn). Part Two, Case Studies in Language Use in a Multilingual Society (Dieleman, Choat, Boud'hors, Richter, Cromwell) closes the collection. When the reader carefully studies individual essays, there is much valuable information and analysis, as well as interesting pointers to the direction of future research. As Papaconstantinou says in the introduction, "The approach taken here is broadly socio-historical, and focuses in great part on making the rich source material and its potential better known. If anything, this collection demonstrates the necessity for further work in this field with a full theoretical framework to support it" (4). Due to the great advantages offered by the preservation of evidence on papyri, multilingualism in Egypt from 300 B.C.E. to 700 C.E. can be studied over a "wider range of social strata and language registers" (3). She then reviews topics that need study, including separation between Greek and Egyptian cultures, interference, bilingual scribes, education, group language use, bilingual archives, gender, and public use of language, and points out how each essay advances research. Torallas follows with a historical survey of the evidence, and the questions that it raises, in "Linguistic Identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt." She offers a useful review of the Greek presence in Egypt before Alexander, based on both literary and documentary evidence. Then, after an overview of changes in Egyptian written language, Torallas turns to bilingualism and notes that the "level of language mixing and of bilingualism among the speakers was as heterogeneous as the population" (28), yet researchers can only approach this problem by means of written evidence from the Graeco-Roman period.
From this point on, the essays describe and analyze specific bodies of evidence for multilingualism in Egypt. In Part One (Documents and Archives), Willy Clarysse, "Bilingual Papyrological Archives," begins with useful links to on-line databases for papyri and ostraca and defines an archive as "a group of several texts that were brought together in Antiquity by an institution or person" (48). After discussing aspects of the relationship between archives and archaeology, Clarysse turns to bilingual Greek-Demotic archives and presents the evidence with an effective combination of graphs and text. The late Sarah J. Clackson, whose essay "Coptic or Greek? Bilingualism in the Papyri" was posthumously edited by Papaconstantinou from two conference papers, provides an excellent introduction to the relationship between written Coptic and Greek in the fourth to seventh centuries. Beginning students of Coptic, papyrology, and related fields would get a good orientation from this essay, since the author aims to dismantle the "dichotomy between 'Greek-speaking culture' and 'Coptic-speaking culture'" (73). Clackson believed that this dichotomy did not exist, but was an artifact of the separation of Greek studies and Egyptian studies in museums, libraries, and universities. More advanced students and scholars will learn from the examples presented of interference between Greek and Coptic at the level of lexicons and syntax, and from the discussion of bilingual Coptic-Greek archives, "focusing on who was writing what and why" (88). The last essay in Part 1 is "Multilingual Archives and Documents in Post-Conquest Egypt" by Petra Sijpesteijn, who carries the subject into and beyond the seventh century through analysis of the use of Greek, Coptic, and Arabic in public and private archives. Her conclusion highlights the significant increase in the use of written Arabic in archives from the seventh to the eighth centuries, but also underlines the difficulty in understanding how Egypt eventually "became an entirely Arabic-speaking country" (123). Sijpesteijn's more speculative ideas about this, related to changes in low-level administration and religious conversion, point the direction to further research. Part Two (Case Studies in Language Use in a Multilingual Society) is longer, with five essays in rough chronological order by date of texts. Jacco Dieleman, in "What's in a Sign? Translating Filiation in the Demotic Magical Papyri," examines the relationship between written Egyptian (Demotic), spoken Egyptian, and Greek through the evidence of bilingual magical manuscripts in which a Greek abbreviation sign is used in the Demotic font. Dieleman then asks, "Are there any indications that the foreign loan sign articulates a particular sentiment on the part of the editors within its new linguistic and scriptural environment?" (129). After a very careful and clearly written analysis, Dieleman ends by saying that "it remains unclear to me what these sections have in common that could explain the loan sign's occurrence" (151). Yet the reader will not be disappointed with this modest conclusion because the analysis has been so careful and has set a standard for future research. Malcolm Choat, "Early Coptic Epistolography," shifts the discussion into the Coptic period of written Egyptian, looks at formulae in early Coptic letters, and "assesses the relative influence of Graeco-Roman patterns, the letters of Paul, and earlier Egyptian precursors" (153). He concludes that all three elements influenced Coptic practice, and therefore that the knowledge of "the last guardians of Demotic" (178), namely the Egyptian priestly class, contributed to Coptic in a way that must be studied further.
Another type of multilingualism is explored by Anne Boud'hors in "Toujours honneur au grec? À propos d'un papyrus gréco-copte de la region thébaine." Some liturgical manuscripts from the seventh century have Greek and Coptic versions of the same text on facing pages. Her analysis demonstrates that the Greek version had a place of honor, but probably was not read in services, thus forecasting the relationship between Coptic and Arabic versions in eleventh-century liturgical manuscripts. Tonio Sebastian Richter, in "Language Change in the Qurra Dossier," adds to the study of written Arabic in Egypt with an exploration of a trilingual collection of texts related to taxation and dated to the early eighth century. His essay begins with a statement of principle regarding language choice in written versus spoken communication, continues with background on Umayyad administration in Egypt, and then delves into the details of the Qurra dossier, leading to some suggestions about the usage of both spoken and written Coptic in the public domain. Finally, Jennifer Cromwell offers a case study of the work of an eighth-century scribe who wrote both Coptic and Greek texts, "Aristophanes Son of Johannes: An Eighth- Century Bilingual Scribe? A Study of Graphic Bilingualism." Aristophanes clearly used different Coptic and Greek hands for texts in each language and the illustrations and analysis in Cromwell's essay are very clear and helpful. It seems that there were multiple schools for scribal training and Aristophanes was the product of one that taught two different styles. But the relationship between this graphic bilingualism and true bilingualism, as in the famous case of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, remains to be explored.
The reader will have some problems in using this volume. On occasion, poor choices in English lead to confusion. See, for example, "did not go wasted on administrators" (8) and "a man invested in Christ" (40 n. 98); other instances could be cited. The table of contents omits the headings Part One and Part Two. There are no bibliographies, either at the end of each essay or in the volume as a whole, although there is an index. The publisher should have corrected these problems, yet they do not negate the value of the collection. The essays by Torallas, Clarysse, Clackson, Sijpesteijn, and Richter combine background material that would be very helpful to both beginners and advanced students with expert analysis of a specific problem. The entire case study section (Part Two) offers material from the cutting edge of multilingual studies, where technical command of the material is combined with understanding of the theoretical framework.