Page "Athanasius of Alexandria" Paragraph 25

St Athanasius was an Egyptian born in the city of Alexandria or possibly the nearby Nile Delta town of Damanhur.

His superior command of Greek, and the fact that the vast majority of his writings were in Greek, led some in the West to claim that he was a Greek born in Alexandria.

However, in Coptic literature, St Athanasius is the first patriarch of Alexandria to use Coptic as well as Greek in his writings.

The fact that he assumed the Episcopal see of Alexandria at a time of rising Egyptian Nationalism and of his being a Noted Egyptian leader lends additional support to his Egyptian Ancestry.