Coptic manuscript discovery

http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/29/0529conn.html

"A cache of manuscripts up to 1,500 years old has been discovered in a Coptic monastery in the Western Desert of Egypt. The find was made at Deir al-Surian, the Monastery of the Syrians, which already has one of the richest ancient libraries in Christendom. Set in the desert sands and virtually cut off from the outside world until recently, Deir al-Surian traces its roots back to the earliest period of Christian monasticism. Established in the 6th century, it was soon occupied by monks from Syria and Mesopotamia and is currently home to 200 Egyptian Copts."

See the full story on the above web page.

Third Symposium on Coptic Studies

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/783/heritage.htm

There's a good summary on the Al Ahram website of the recent coptic conference in at the White Monastery of St Shenoude near Sohag:

" The symposium at the White Monastery, which concentrated on a single Upper Egyptian monk who became abbot of two monasteries, played an important part in the history of Christendom, and reputedly lived to the ripe age 118 (an age that Emmel considers entirely possible), drew together scholars from as far afield as Australia and Canada. It caused a stir among the population of Sohag that will long be remembered. Already other bishoprics in Middle and Upper Egypt have expressed a desire to host the next symposium in two years' time, and it seems that Nagada, between Qena and Luxor, is high on the list of possibilities."

Coptic trove from Al-Gurna

Al Ahram Weekly by Nevine El-Aref

In Al-Gurna where several excavation missions are probing for more Ancient Egyptian treasures under the sand, a team from the Polish Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology has stumbled on a major Coptic trove buried under the remains of a sixth-century monastery located in front of a Middle Kingdom tomb.

Excavators unearthed two papyri books with Coptic text along with a set of parchments placed between two wooden labels as well as Coptic ostraca, pottery fragments and textiles.

The head of the team, Tomaz Gorecki, said the books were well preserved except for the papyri papers which were exceptionally dry.

The first book has a hard plain cover embellished with Roman text from the inside while the second includes no less than 50 papers coated with a partly deteriorated leather cover bearing geometrical drawings. In the middle, a squared cross 32cm long and 26cm wide is found.

As for the set of parchments, Gorecki said it included 60 papers with a damaged leather cover and an embellished wooden locker.

See the above page for the full story.

A museum of Coptic identity

Al Ahram Weekly By Jill Kamill

With photos (click the small image to see the bigger photographs)

The Coptic Museum is approaching the last stage of structural restoration prior to its official re-opening this year as a state-of-the-art museum. Jill Kamil looks into what's going on

It was no easy matter to gain access to a building that was being restored -- or transformed, rather -- and even more difficult to find someone able, or willing, to talk about progress, plans and deadlines. The Coptic Museum has been off-limits to visitors for a long while now, and with rumour circulating that some galleries would re-open this year, Al-Ahram Weekly sent a team to investigate.

The reason for our interest was that no attempt had ever been made to sort out this huge jumble of Coptic antiquities of more than 16,000 objects according to historical sequence. This was understandable a century ago, when Morcos Samaika founded the museum, because provenance details for the bulk of the objects were not available. They had been collected haphazardly from abandoned burial grounds, derelict monasteries and ancient temple sites. Because Christian monuments were of little concern to early archaeologists, objects were trodden into the earth, covered by sandstorms, or used for garden decorations. In a word, neglected.

When in 1910 Samaika assembled the wide array of objects which revealed different ethnic influences, it presented him with a dilemma: how to put them into some semblance of order? He opted for the easy way out. He grouped the objects into media -- stonework, metalwork, tapestries, manuscripts, woodwork, pottery, glassware, etc. A few galleries were devoted to objects from a single source, like those
from the fifth-century monasteries of St Jeremais at Saqqara and St Apollo at Bawit, but there were also galleries of "miscellaneous objects".

See the above page for more.

Coptic art steals the show

Al Ahram Weekly by Jill Kamil and Nevine El-Aref

Who are the Copts? What is their history? Who founded the famous monasteries on the Red Sea coast? With Coptic Egypt significantly overshadowed in the West by an unquenchable thirst for all things Pharaonic, these questions fail to figure on any considerable scale in foreign exhibitions of Egyptian antiquities.

Which is what makes the exhibition on Coptic art at the Arab World Institute (Institut du Monde Arabe) in Paris so exciting. Celebrating 2,000 years of Christianity in Egypt, it is the first exhibition of Coptic art in France for 36 years. An earlier exhibit, at the Petit Palais in Paris in 1964, was on a much smaller scale and did not include any objects from Egyptian collections.

The current exhibition, which will run at the Arab World Institute until September, features more than 350 unique objects, 105 of which are from the Coptic and Islamic museums in Cairo. In France, objects have been chosen from the Louvre, in Paris, and the Textile Museum in Lyon. Other objects hail from Italy's Turin Museum, the British Museum, the Egyptological Institute of Heidelberg, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, Russia's Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

"This is the first time ever that Coptic objects from Egypt have been selected for exhibition abroad," said Gaballa Ali Gaballa, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). The bulk of Egyptian objects are from Cairo's Coptic Museum.

The exhibition is in the central hall of the institute, one of the most splendid and prestigious locations covering an area of 1,200 square metres. The objects are divided into numerous sections that cover the gamut of Coptic history -- from icons to children's toys to funerary objects. Displays range from textiles and manuscripts to cosmetics, jewellery, ceramics, wall paintings, metalwork and stone and wooden statues. Visitors will also see Coptic literature, on papyrus and parchment, as well as stone fragments inscribed with texts (known as ostraca).

See the above page for more details, with photographs.