THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

This example, dated by Perdrizet/Lefebvre ca. 200-100 B.C.E., commences with a
false start: line one misses the G and therefore starts a fresh line in a firmer hand. A
Greek date Lε “in year 5” is added and we have “year 5 of pharaoh” with the name
“Urgonaphor” appearing at the end of that line. Based upon I would date the text to
the year 202 B.C.E., the fifth year of pharaoh Harmakhis, also known as
Haronnophris and Hurgonaphor, 14
who led a successful revolt in the Thebaid. Pierre
Lacau, the first Egyptologist to see this graffito, rendered lines 3 and 4 in Coptic, “I
saw Isis with Osiris, I saw Amun-Re, King of the Gods, the Great God”, and with this
we must basically agree. “NOM” is an inverted MN, the “L” in Amon-Ra is a
common feature from the New Kingdom onwards, SONTHER a Greek rendering of
“King of the Gods” from nisw ntrw, and the ω at the end is a suffix meaning “great”.
However, the verbal-form is still troubling. It is obviously a qualitative and would
seem to be from the verb Με, “to love”. This does not work rhetorically in an
Egyptian context as it was not the normal expression used to describe a connection
between the king and the gods: “beloved of” is the obvious choice which would entail
another verb. Lacau has obviously opted to take the M as an N for just this reason,
and thus we have the qualitative of the verb NAY, to see.
This confirmation of Greek-Egyptian linguistic interaction suggests that a true
Greek-Egyptian cultural/economic interaction in Egypt generated the need for the
Egyptian language to be transcribed into the Greek alphabet for a variety of reasons,
possibly even as early as 750-656 B.C.E. during the reign of Psammetichus I. 15
I propose then to develop a social model based upon Greek-Egyptian
interaction from 650 B.C.E. to 384 C.E., that is, the era of the early Greek settlements
in Egypt, extending through Ptolemaic and Roman times until Demotic was
eventually replaced by Coptic as the written Egyptian script. 16
This phase I shall call
14
Bowman, Egypt After the Pharaohs, 30.
15
The Egyptian king Psammetichus I employed Greek mercenaries in his army and allowed
for the settlement of the first Greek communities in Egypt by rewarding these soldiers with
two pieces of land for their services. According to Diodorus, Psammetichus encouraged
trade with Greece, and “was so great an admirer of the Hellenes that he gave his sons a
Greek education,” Diodorus Siculus I, I.67.9. Herodotus records that the Greeks were welltreated
and respected by the king, who also founded a school of interpreters. See Boardman,
The Greeks Overseas, Chapter 4. It is, I believe, reasonable to assume that apart from
translating Greek into Egyptian, this school might have attempted at least the transliteration
of spoken Egyptian into the Greek alphabet. The earliest written evidence for actual
linguistic influence may exist in the form of a Kushite inscription found at Abydos. See Jill
Kamil’s work, Coptic Egypt: History and Guide (Cairo: The American University in Cairo
Press, 1987), 22, in which she reports that “the earliest attempt to write the Egyptian
language alphabetically in Greek, feeble but important, has survived in an inscription dating
to the Kushite dynasty... at Abydos.” No note or further description is given for this
inscription and I am yet unable to track it down.
16
The date 650 B.C.E. puts us well into the reign of the aforementioned Psammetichus I (664-
10) who restored free rule to Egypt from the Assyrians, and it is in this period that we first
hear of numbers of Greeks in Egypt. This, in conjunction with the possibly useful Kushite
inscription, marks the beginning of the social possibilities for early Coptic. Boardman, The