From Egyptian to Coptic: Religious Vocabulary Anthony Alcock The following short note is concerned with largely religious

terms that have successfully negotiated the transition from Pharaonic to Christian Egypt, from a relatively open religious system not based on revelation to a relatively closed one based on revelation. Not surprisingly, the meanings of these words have changed in the process. This note is intended to furnish a brief guide to how this might have happened. The words are arranged, as far as possible, thematically in groups amNte/th/noun These are all geographical or topographical terms. The first, amNte, in Ancient Egyptian (AE) is usually transliterated as imnt, the West. In a non-religious context it refers to the cardinal point of the compass. It also means 'right': the point of orientation for Egyptians was south, the source of their existence. It came to be associated with the territory occupied by the dead probably quite early on in Egyptian history. Since the end of the journey of sun (god) is the west, it is not difficult to imagine that the west came to be associated with darkness and death.1 One of the titles of Osiris, who became the god of the dead, was First of the Westerners (xnti-imntyw)2, a reference to his kingship in the land of the dead that probably goes back to the First Dynasty (c.3100 BC)3. This term has found its way into Coptic, as amNte, where it refers to the realm of the force opposed to God.4 amNte, on the other hand, has little to do with geography and is regarded as the realm of the devil. The specific area of the netherworld where judgement took place in the earlier religion is the place known as d(w)At, which has entered Coptic as th. Whereas amNte is a relatively common word, th is very uncommon. In fact it occurs only twice, both in magical papyri, one where Osiris is described as pero Nthi 'king of the underworld' and one in a Demotic magical text, where the Coptic form is written above the demotic text which reads 'open up the underworld'. The last term in the group noun is not uncommon in Coptic texts. Its ancestor is nwn, which is always associated with water (the god Nun, the primeval waters, the Nile inundation, and so on). In Coptic texts it is more often than not associated with depth (of earth or sea) or abyss (of hell) and in one text, the
1

Pyramid Text Utterance 697: "Do not go upon the waters of the West. Those who go there do not come back. But go upon the waters of the East, among the followers of Re." 2 A title that may have been transferred to him from Anubis. 3 A version of the Osiris myth in narrative style is recorded in the 2nd cent. AD by Plutarch. The most detailed study of Osiris is that of J.G. Griffiths The origins of Osiris (1966), who describes the king (p.161) as a 'corporate personality which embodied his subjects', which explains why every dead person (at least the ones we know of) was called 'Osiris'. 4 According to a homily by Athanasius on the Soul and the Body (E.A. W. Budge Coptic Homilies, 1910 pp.115 ff., death separates the soul from the body, the latter returning whence it came, the former trapped in the bonds of amNte, weeping and sighing (esrime auw saaxom). Generally speaking, imnt refers to a large and relatively unspecific area that retains a certain geographical component.

Apocalypse of Elijah (p.50), where the angel Eremiel, in whose hand all the souls are imprisoned, describes himself as pet5oop n5rhi xijnpnoun mnamNte (the one who is upon the abyss and Hades). Broadly speaking, it is, unlike its ancestor, almost always negative. bai/i4 AE thinking seems to have envisaged the 'person' as consisting of several elements: shadow (Swt), corpse (XAt), heart (ib) name (rn), kA, bAi and finally Ax. The last three are often not translated because there is no equivalent term in our conceptual framework for them. The first of these terms has not survived into Coptic, but is understood as a 'life force' 5, while the latter two have survived. The foreunner of bai is bA(i), often depicted in funerary scenes as a bird leaving the body at death. It also features prominently in a poem of melancholic beauty to which various modern titles have been attached: 'The dialogue of a man with his bA(i)', 'The man who was weary of life' are among the English language titles. It was probably written at a time when there was a certain amount of social and political upheaval in the country and the human interlocutor clearly feels sorry for himself and speculates about how pleasant an end to all this might be. The bA(i) berates him from time with questions such as n ntk is s iw.k ptr Anx.ti (Are you not a man ? You're still alive, aren't you ?) 6 The term in Coptic is used once in a magical text and, possibly by some confusion with the word for 'night owl', in a Gostic text. i4 is derived from Ax, a concept that was clearly regarded by the Egyptians as a state that one could occupy: imAx 'the one who is in Ax.' It seems to refer to that state occupied by the deceased, and is often rendered in English by 'effective' and German by 'verklrt' (transfigured). After death the bA(i) joined the kA and the resultant state was Ax, an 'effective' state that ensured continued survival. The Coptic term survives principally in Boharic, where it is used of spirits and demons hostile to Christians. e.g. Acts 17,22. ouaab/xont The first of these terms is an adjective connected with the concept of purity. Its ancestor is wab. Both are also used of a person engaged in god-related activities, that is, some sort of 'priest'. The ancient wab is often translated as a 'wab -priest', a minor functionary in the temple apparatus who performed the necessary jobs of keeping the place clean, looking after the linen, ritual equipment,
5

See for example W.K. Simpson (ed.) The Literature of Ancient Egypt ( 2003) p. 173. 'the king is kA', with a reference to Adolf Erman's understanding of the concept. The hieroglyph, two outstretched arms, might represent an embrace, where the life force, which originated with the creator and passed on to the king, was transmitted physically by this means from one generation to another cf. James Allen Middle Egyptian: an Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (2010): 82. 6 In some ways it is reminiscent of passages in Coptic literature, such as the dialogue between Samuel of Kalamun and a camel during his first abortive capture by Berbers: the saint is feeling sorry for himself and the camel, to which the gift of speech has been granted by an angel, berates the saint for pusillanimous self-pitying behaviour. cf. Anthony Alcock The Life of Samuel of Kalamun by Isaac the Presbyter (1983): 88ff.

and so on. People of this sort did not necessarily come into direct contact with the god. This word has passed into Coptic with very little change to the core meaning of pure, but it acquired another dimension which we understand as 'holy'. Thus, ouhhb can mean 'priest', petouaab 'one who is holy'. xont, however, has a different meaning, and this is almost certainly connected with the fact that Hm-ntr, its ancestor, was a type of 'priest' much more closely connected with cult of the god. The name means something like 'body/servant of god'. Christians,of course, were aware of the associations of the word and so used it mostly of 'pagan' priests, but there is one use of it in Bohairic where Sahidic uses ouhhb (Gen. 41, 45). knxe/Rpe/xeneete These three terms are used to designate places. The second is derived from the AE rA-pr, one of the words for 'temple'. The second element alone is often understood to mean 'house'. The the pictogram used for this word does not actually look like a house, but more like an an enclosure of some sort. It may refer to an institution (household) rather than a physical structure (house).7 The prefix rA means 'mouth, opening', and the combination is usually taken to mean 'temple area' or 'domain'. Rpe can mean 'temple', pagan as well as Christian (1 Cor. 3,16), but also 'church', 'martyr's shrine' or 'sanctuary'. It also survives in Arabic as a place name 'birba', often the site of a temple. The third is another AE word for 'temple' Hwt-ntr and is translated as the 'house of the god', which probably refers to the physical structure. This has found its way into Coptic as xeneete, which means 'monastery (male)/convent (female)'. This word has also survived in Arabic as 'handa'. Interestingly enough, there is a place at the western end of the Dakhla Oasis called Tenda (and may signal that there was a Christian monastery there at some point), which is probably from the same origin, but with the difference that it is constructed with the definite article t- and the long vowel has changed from -- to -- in written form, but I suspect that the written vowels do not accurately reproduce the sound that is actually made. The first word in the group, knxe 'porch, shrine', is ultimately derived from knHw, meaning 'dark'. It came to be used of a shrine, probably because the shrine was the darkest place in an Egyptian temple.

The type of legal document known as imyt-pr 'what is in the house' was a will.