The Role of the Church and Monasticism in the Growth of Legal Coptic

This chapter studies the role of the Church and monasticism in the growth of legal Coptic. To do so, it presents three documentary dossiers that will clarify the major impetus that monasticism exerted with regard to this phenomenon, and the various mechanisms that it followed. The first dossier is a codex of eight wooden tablets that the Louvre Museum acquired in 1992. The tablets contain around twenty-six receipts, some of which are related to taxation, written by different people. These receipts are not written in the same language: twenty are in Greek and six are in Coptic. Ultimately, the codex offers early evidence that Coptic was used in a taxation context under the impetus of a monastic institution. The latter's responsibility for a portion of the collection process explains why Coptic was accepted for this use by the community. The other two dossiers, sharing the same provenance, demonstrates more precisely the role of monasticism in the rise of Coptic and in its creation of a language that could compete with Greek in nonprivate usage.