The Rise of Coptic by Jean-Luc Fournet;

Author:Jean-Luc Fournet;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

This text does rather give the impression of being a petition, but it is true that during this period, letters often tended to be contaminated by the rhetoric of petitions, especially when they communicated a request. The absence of a prescript prevents us from knowing whom this poor woman (whose name was probably Merkouria82) was addressing, but on the other hand, it shows that this request was placed directly in the hands of its recipient, which was typical of petitions, for they were always personally placed in the hands of the judge. It happens that the reverse side contains capital information that the editor did not see: in a script that attempts to imitate the style of the addresses inscribed on the back of letters, it reads, in Greek, between two columns of a subsequent account, “Aurelius John, defensor by the grace of God.”83 We would expect this to be the name of the recipient of this petition, and the fact that he is a defensor makes it very likely that our unfortunate woman was addressing him.84 This address is repeated on the front side upside down with respect to the text of the petition, with additional information added by another person: “Aurelius John, defensor of Apollonos Ano,”85 in other words, Edfu.

However, that is not all: once again upside down with respect to the petition, we can see the end of another text, only the last line of which is visible: “[…] that was how I was able to resolve (μεσάζειν) the matter between them.”86 In other words, we have the end of the decision of the defensor.

Therefore, this is what we can reconstruct regarding the progress of the matter at hand: Merkouria claims alimony from her husband, who left the marital home. This provokes a dispute that is initially resolved by a settlement, requiring the husband to pay alimony to his wife. He does not respect his commitments, and Merkouria decides to call upon the justice of the defensor by submitting a petition to him. He renders a decision.87 Moreover, as we see, everything was done in Coptic.

This is the first known petition in Coptic. It does not have a date, but I believe the writing to be from the beginning of the seventh century, and in any case, it seems to me and Alain Delattre to date prior to the Arab domination.88 Another petition, also published as a letter and quite similar in its form, although in this case addressed from a widow to a bishop, clearly dates to the Sasanian period (619–29), as can be seen from allusions to the Persians.89 There are certainly others still to identify within the vast corpus of Coptic letters.

I would have liked the evidence regarding the legal use of Coptic to be datable without question to the Byzantine regime, but this is not the case of the widow’s petition, and there is doubt surrounding that of Merkouria. However, I think it likely that the aspirations of a Coptophone population with limited

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