The Coptic Encyclopedia
.Aziz S. Atiya, ed.,
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The newly published Coptic Encyclopedia is an impressive work in many ways
and,
despite some unevenness, it will become a very useful tool for
various
disciplines related to Coptic studies in the broadest sense. Any decent
library
must get it.
The editors have asked some of the best specialists in Coptic matters,
from
many countries, to write about 2800 entries, which they divide into four
main
categories: early Christian history, biographies of saints and other
historical
figures, art and architecture, and archaeology. Moreover, they have decided
to
give various aspects of the Coptic language more than 200 pages (400
columns)
in the last volume, under the editorship of the Swiss Coptologist
Rodolphe
Kasser. Many of the entries are very rich, in both content and
bibliography,
and appear to represent the status quaestionis. Others are weaker, as is
the
case in any such collective enterprise, and/or of only tangential relevance
to
a Coptic encyclopedia. The editors have sought, and rightly so, to include in
the work everything related to the history, the religion, and the
material
culture of Christians in Egypt, mainly from the first centuries when Coptic
was
spoken, side by side with Greek, but also from the Islamic period,
when
Christian literature begins to be written in Arabic, and up to
contemporary
issues, represented rather unevenly by some entries. Here, one would
have
wished for more details on the situation of the Copts today, but this
is
obviously a delicate issue, on which the editors might not have felt free
to
express themselves.
Coptologists proper (linguists, such as Kasser, A. Shisha Halevy, or W.P.
Funk,
and philologists, for instance T. Orlandi and P. Nagel), students of Coptic
art
(P. du Bourguet, for instance), archaeologists (many entries, very
detailed,
are written by P. Grossmann on what seems to be most ancient
Egyptian
churches), scholars of Arabic Christian literature (Khalil Samir,
S.J.),
specialists of patristics and ecclesiastical history (A. Guillaumont and
W.
Frend, for instance) have all collaborated on the enterprise, for our
benefit.
The reader will find in these volumes many valuable details, such as
the
existence and location of manuscripts. Previously such information could
be
obtained only through much more intense effort, dispersed as the material is
in
many obscure publications known only by specialists.
Reviewed by:
Gedaliahu Guy Stroumsa
Annenberg Research Institute
420 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA
U.S.A. 19106