Epilogue
faced yet, must be Graeco-Roman Egypt, the inheritor of several millennia
of civilisation, with its distinctive architecture, art forms, customs, govern-
mental structure, and religious and social structure, and exhibiting in ex-
ceptionally complex form the interaction of its culture with Greek, and the
survival and flourishing of its regional culture and historical memory, in far
more distinctive forms than are characteristic of almost any other region,
not to speak of the eventual evolution of its language, in the form of Cop-
tic, as a language of Christian culture and liturgy. There are many reasons
why Egypt is wholly exceptional among the regions which came within the
domination of Graeco-Roman civilisation: the geological and ecological na-
ture of Egypt, as a narrow strip of fertile land along a major river, bounded
on either side by mountains or desert; the sheer weight of its past and its
major pre-classical monuments, which still dominate the landscape today; its
very distinctive art and architecture; and, above all, the linguistic demands
imposed on any individual if he or she were to be fully conversant with the
hieroglyphic Egyptian writing found on monuments (and still being writ-
ten in the Roman imperial period), with the demotic Egyptian found on
papyri and ostraca, and with Coptic, as well as with the mass of Greek (and
some Latin) also found on papyri and ostraca. So it is perhaps not surprising
that a large-scale, fully multi-dimensional, history of Egypt in the thousand
years between Alexander and the Islamic conquests has yet to be written.^14
In the writer’s eyes this remains one of the most challenging tasks facing stu-
dents of the ancient world. It is all the more so, and all the more important,
because any such approach would also have to confront one of the most im-
portant chapters in the earlier history of Christianity. But would it in fact be
one chapter or two? Was ‘‘Egyptian’’ Christianity a coherent entity, or were
Greek and Coptic Christianity separate and contrasting elements?^15 What
part the history of Christianity should play in our approach to the ancient
world is a topic to which we will return later.
So far, the emphasis has been, firstly, on the complete (potential) transfor-
mation in the means of access to the Greek and Latin heritage of the ancient
world and, secondly, on the variety of languages to be found even in an ‘‘An-
cient World’’ whose scope in time and place is defined by the use of Greek and
Latin. In the case of most of these languages we come to the literature and
. To say this implies no lack of appreciation of (for instance) the masterly survey by
A. K. Bowman,EgyptafterthePharaohs,..–..:FromAlexandertotheArabConquest
(), or of K. Michalowski,The Art of Ancient Egypt().
. See now S. J. Davis,The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in
Late Antiquity().