Gabriel Nocchi Macedo (Université de Liège)
In 634 armies of the Rashidun Caliphate invaded Egypt under the commandment of general ‘Amr b. al-‘Āṣ; six years later, they conquered Alexandria, and new stage in the country’s history began. The first centuries of the Arab rule in Egypt are characterized by both continuity and innovation in the cultural, economic, and social spheres. Establishing their capital in the city of Fustat, Muslim rulers made use of Byzantine administrative and legal structures, which they progressively “Islamized”, by the means of policies serving the interests of the Arab mainland, and an increasingly tight control of the offices held by Christians (Kennedy 1998, Sijpesteijn 2007). The linguistic landscape first remained unchanged, with the bulk of the population speaking Greek and Coptic. Even after governor ‘Adballah ibn Sa’d (ruled 646-656) made Arabic the official administrative language, Greek would remain in use in provincial administration (Mikhail 2016, de Jong – Delattre 2021). Correspondingly, Classical Greek culture, much of which had been incorporated into Christianity, was not wiped out, but progressively faded away.
Among the more than 8000 Greek papyri preserving Classical (non-Christian) works of literature, only 46 can be relatively safely dated to the very final years of the Byzantine period and to the beginning of the Islamic period, i.e., between the second half of the VII century and the end of the VIII century (1). These fragments have attracted little scholarly attention, and are seldom included in discussions on the transition from Byzantine to Islamic Egypt (Sundelin 2004). This paper proposes a first survey of this material, in the hopes of bringing new insights into the reception of Greek literature at the dusk of Late Antiquity.
Following a brief presentation of the content, provenance, and dating of the papyri, an analysis of their material aspects (dimensions, script, paratext) allows for an enquiry on the social contexts in which the original books were produced and used. Schools and elite circles appear as the last bastions of Greek literary culture in Egypt. Looking at the authors and texts preserved in the fragments, and comparing them to material from preceding periods, I consider the effects that the political and social changes might have had on the education and literary taste of Greek-speaking Egyptians. As Greek language and culture were steadily being marginalized, works of Classical literature and the books that held them gained a new significance: they were no longer markers of a triumphing civilization, but those of a conquered people.
(1) For the purpose of the discussion, only stricto sensu Greek literary texts by known pagan authors are taken into consideration. Anonymous fragments, paraliterary texts, and school exercises are excluded.