(in the north of Yemen).^7 Then, once more, he assumed the
deanship of the School.
- Meanwhile, the leaders of the Church felt the need of
having the Gospel written in the native tongue of the land
but in a script that would be within the grasp of the common
man, and that he could comprehend and learn. Such was not
the case of the hieroglyphic pictograph nor of the demotic
script. According to tradition, Pantaenus and Clement
cooperated to produce this new and easy script, to replace
the ancient hieroglyphs. The fruit of their labour was the
Coptic language: namely, the pharaonic speech written in
the Greek alphabets with the addition of seven letters for
sounds which did not exist in Greek, but existed in the
Egyptian. About this transformation in the Egyptian writing,
Sir Alfred J. Butler wrote in his book, "The Ancient Coptic
Churches of Egypt”.^8 'The romance of language could go no
further than to join the speech of Pharaoh and the writing of
Homer in the service book of a Christian Egyptian".
Pantaenus and Clement resorted to the Greek script
for two reasons. first, Greek was the language of the
cultured elite throughout the known world then, and hence
was the language in which the Gospel was first preached to
the Egyptians; second, it was actually familiar to many
Egyptians. Through this new method of writing, the Gospel
was preached and taught to the masses, and they adopted
Christianity, with fervour. Their hearts and minds opened up
to It for It embodied some of their already accepted beliefs,
such as immortality, resurrection and the soul's judgment.
Inscriptions in certain of the ancient Egyptian tombs, such as
those written on the tomb of Petosiris, for example, ring with
a note very reminiscent of certain Biblical passages.^9
Having given the Egyptians this invaluable gift of a
simplified method of reading and writing, Pantaenus and