Page "Coptic language" Paragraph 13

The earliest attempts to write the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet are Greek transcriptions of Egyptian proper names, most of which date to the Ptolemaic period.

Scholars frequently refer to this phase as Pre-Coptic.

However, it is clear that by the late pharaonic period, demotic scribes regularly employed a more phonetic orthography, a testament to the increasing cultural contact between Egyptians and Greeks even before Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt.

Coptic itself, or Old Coptic, takes root in the 1st century.

The transition from the older Egyptian scripts to the newly adapted Graeco-Coptic script was in part due to the decline of the traditional role played by the priestly class of ancient Egyptian religion, who unlike most ordinary Egyptians, were literate in the temple scriptoria.

Old Coptic is represented mostly by non-Christian texts such as Egyptian pagan prayers and magical and astrological papyri.

Many of them served as glosses to original hieratic and demotic equivalents.

The glosses may have been aimed at non-Egyptian speakers.