Editing Coptic language (section)

=== Pre-Islamic period ===
[[File:Coptic liturgic inscription.JPG|right|thumb|Coptic liturgical inscription from [[Upper Egypt]], dated to the fifth or sixth century.]]

The earliest attempts to write the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet are Greek transcriptions of Egyptian proper names, most of which date to the [[Ptolemaic Kingdom]]. Scholars frequently refer to this phase as Pre-Coptic. However, it is clear that by the [[Late Period of ancient Egypt]], demotic scribes regularly employed a more phonetic orthography, a testament to the increasing cultural contact between [[Egyptians]] and [[Greeks]] even before [[Alexander the Great]]'s conquest of Egypt.

After Alexanders the Great's conquest of Egypt and the subsequent Greek administration of the [[Ptolemaic Kingdom]] led to the widespread [[hellenization]] and Greek-Coptic bilingualism more so in [[Lower Egypt|Northern Egypt]] and especially in the [[Nile Delta]]. This led to the entrance of many Greek loanwords into Coptic, particularly in words relating to technical, legal, commercial, and technological topics.{{sfn|Lambdin|1983|pp=vii-viii}}

Coptic itself, or [[Old Coptic]], takes root in the first century. The transition from the older Egyptian scripts to the newly adapted Coptic alphabet was in part due to the decline of the traditional role played by the priestly class of [[ancient Egyptian religion]], who, unlike most ordinary Egyptians, were literate in the temple scriptoria. Old Coptic is represented mostly by non-Christian texts such as Egyptian pagan prayers and magical and astrological papyri. Many of them served as [[gloss (annotation)|glosses]] to original [[hieratic]] and demotic equivalents. The glosses may have been aimed at non-Egyptian speakers.

Under late [[Roman Egypt|Roman rule]], [[Diocletian]] persecuted many Egyptian converts to the new [[Christianity|Christian religion]], which forced new converts to flee to the Egyptian deserts. In time, the growth of these communities generated the need to write Christian Greek instructions in the Egyptian language. The early Fathers of the [[Coptic Church]], such as [[Anthony the Great]], [[Pachomius the Great]], [[Macarius of Egypt]] and [[Athanasius of Alexandria]], who otherwise usually wrote in Greek, addressed some of their works to the Egyptian monks in Egyptian. The Egyptian language, now written in the Coptic alphabet, flourished in the second and third centuries. However, it was not until [[Shenoute]] that Coptic became a fully standardised literary language based on the Sahidic dialect. Shenouda's native Egyptian tongue and knowledge of Greek and rhetoric gave him the necessary tools to elevate Coptic, in content and style, to a literary height nearly equal to the position of the Egyptian language in ancient Egypt.