Egypt is the richest source of primary documents for the society of late antiquity. Its thousands of papyri provide insight into everyday life and topics ignored by ancient authors. This handbook is an indispensable tool in navigating these documents.

Collected Studies CS1070 The present book collects 31 articles that Jacques van der Vliet, a leading scholar in the field of Coptic Studies (Leiden University / Radboud University, Nijmegen), has published since 1999 on Christian inscriptions from Egypt and Nubia. These inscriptions are dated between the third/fourth and the fourteenth centuries, and are often written in Coptic and/or Greek, once in Latin, and sometimes (partly) in Arabic, Syriac or Old Nubian. They include inscriptions on tomb stones, walls of religious buildings, tools, vessels, furniture, amulets and even texts on luxury garments. Whereas earlier scholars in the field of Coptic Studies often focused on either Coptic or Greek, Van der Vliet argues that inscriptions in different languages that appear in the same space or on the same kind of objects should be examined together. In addition, he aims to combine the information from documentary texts, archaeological remains and inscriptions, in order to reconstruct the economic, social and religious life of monastic or civil communities. He practiced this methodology in his studies on the Fayum, Wadi al-Natrun, Sohag, Western Thebes and the region of Aswan and Northern Nubia, which are all included in this book.

This volume provides a synthetic study of the political, social, and economic processes which formed early Islamic Egypt. Looking at a corpus of previously unknown Arabic papyrus letters, Sijpesteijn examines the reasons for the success of the early Arab conquests and the transition from the pre-Islamic Byzantine system to an Arab/Muslim state.

Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests is a showcase of new discoveries in an exciting and rapidly developing field: the study of the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. The Arab conquests are shown to have changed both the Arabian conquerors and the conquered.

The ethnic pluralism of the Holy Land is unparalleled elsewhere. Whatever period of history, or even of prehistory, one chooses to consider, the land, due to its geographical position, was always home to diverse ethne and cultures and a capturer of influences from nearby and faraway countries. The same pluralism accounts for an unparalleled coexistence of languages and scripts. Greek and Latin, Hebrew, Jewish, Christian and Samaritan Aramaic, each with its own script, pre-Islamic Arabic in Nabataean and Old Arabic scripts, the occasional Syriac, Palmyrene, Armenian and Georgian inscriptions, Safaitic and Thamudic graffiti in the eastern and southern fringes: all are attested in late antique Holy Land, sometimes influencing one another in vocabulary and formulas. Still, Greek is the prevailing vehicle of written communication from its first appearance in the region in the fourth century BCE to the end of Late Antiquity in the late eighth or early ninth century, and it will draw most of the attention in these pages.

Documents and the History of the Early Islamic World presents new Greek, Arabic and Coptic material from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries C.E. from Egypt and Palestine and explores its rich potential for historical analysis.

The Copts, adherents of the Egyptian Orthodox Church, today represent the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and their presiding bishops have been accorded the title of pope since the third century AD. This study analyzes the development of the Egyptian papacy from its origins to the rise of Islam. How did the papal office in Egypt evolve as a social and religious institution during the first six and a half centuries AD? How do the developments in the Alexandrian patriarchate reflect larger developments in the Egyptian church as a whole—in its structures of authority and lines of communication, as well as in its social and religious practices? In addressing such questions, Stephen J. Davis examines a wide range of evidence—letters, sermons, theological treatises, and church histories, as well as art, artifacts, and archaeological remains—to discover what the patriarchs did as leaders, how their leadership was represented in public discourses, and how those representations definitively shaped Egyptian Christian identity in late antiquity. The Early Coptic Papacy is Volume 1 of The Popes of Egypt: A History of the Coptic Church and Its Patriarchs. Also available: Volume 2, The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt, 641–1517 (Mark N. Swanson) and Volume 3, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy (Magdi Girgis, Nelly van Doorn-Harder).