Copts

• 1. Who Are the Copts

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  The Copts are a Christian community native to Egypt, and in their own language they have a plain name for themselves: rem en khemi, which means the Egyptians. Their church, in the same tongue, is the Egyptian Orthodox Church. That is a striking choice of words for a minority. In English, the word Copt now points to only part of Egypt's people, the part that stayed Christian. Yet the Copts descend from the ancient Egyptians, just as the wider Egyptian population does. This documentary asks how a word that once covered a whole nation came to mark one faith. It asks why the Copts' church broke from the empire that ruled them. It asks how a community of scholars and monks held its identity through centuries of foreign rule. And it asks what survives today, from a language no longer spoken to a calendar descended from the ancient Egyptian one and chant that may carry echoes of ancient Egypt.

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• 2. A Name Worn Down

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  Mycenaean Greek preserves a word, a3-ku-pi-ti-jo, that meant an Egyptian and was used as a man's name. Scholars think it likely traces back to the Middle Egyptian phrase Hut-ka-Ptah. That phrase means the estate or palace of the ka, the double spirit, of the god Ptah. It named the temple complex of Ptah at Memphis, and it came to stand for the city and the region around it. From that seed grew the Greek names Aígyptos for the country and Aigýptios for its people. In Roman Egypt, Aigýptios set the native population apart from Greeks, Romans, Jews and other groups.

  Coptic speakers reshaped the Greek word into aiguption in the Bohairic dialect and kuptaion in the Sahidic. Arabic then turned it into qibt, with the adjective qibti and the plural aqbat. English borrowed the word in the 17th century from Neo-Latin Coptus. Another thread may have helped the name settle. The Greek name of the town of Kóptos in Upper Egypt, now called Qifṭ, sounds much like it.

  The meaning narrowed after the Muslim conquest of 639-646. Copt came to mean only those Egyptians who kept the Christian faith. Muslims ceased to label a family as Coptic after its first generation of converts to Islam. The shift became fixed in the 8th and 9th centuries, as Arabic spread beyond the big cities. Before that, medieval writers sometimes used the same name for Christian Copts and their pre-Christian ancestors.

  The Coptic language never needed a narrower term, because other residents of Egypt, such as the Greeks, already had labels like Hellene. Many peoples name themselves with a word for the people, as the Inuit and the Romani do. In the 20th century, some Egyptian nationalists in the movement called Pharaonism revived qubt in its older sense, for every ethnic Egyptian, Christian and Muslim alike.

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• 3. Foreign Kings, Native Faith

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  In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, and Greek Ptolemaic kings took over the country. Settlers from Greece and elsewhere arrived. One rough estimate puts immigrants at about 10 percent of the population, though other scholars call that figure too high. Most Egyptians kept their language and culture, and people in the villages along the Nile lived much as before. Even in Alexandria, the Ptolemaic capital and the largest Greek city outside Greece, native Egyptians far outnumbered Greeks. The native tongue was the latest stage of the Egyptian language, later known as Coptic. Giving it a coherent writing system probably deepened the line between natives and their Greek rulers.

  In 30 BC, Rome took control, and by then its officials mostly classed the Greeks of Egypt as Egyptians. Foreign rulers also built temples to Egyptian gods, including the Temple of Horus at Edfu and the Temple of Hathor at Dendra. The Faiyum mummy portraits show the blend. Hellenistic painting was attached to coffins of firmly Egyptian character. A dental study of Roman-period Faiyum mummies found their teeth "much more closely akin" to those of earlier Egyptians than to those of Greeks or other Europeans.

  Christianity arrived into this world. Ancient tradition says St. Mark brought it to Alexandria around 42 AD, during the reign of the emperor Claudius. The community he left there was considerable, and within half a century the faith had spread across Egypt. Two finds support this. A Coptic fragment of the Gospel of John from Upper Egypt dates to the first half of the 2nd century. New Testament writings from Oxyrhynchus, in Middle Egypt, date to around 200 AD. During the 2nd century the faith reached the countryside, and scriptures were translated into the language then called Egyptian.

  By the start of the 3rd century AD, Christians made up the majority of Egypt's population. The Church of Alexandria ranked among the four apostolic sees of Christendom, second in honor only to Rome. It remains the oldest Christian church in Africa.

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• 4. Scholars, Monks and Councils

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  Around 190 AD, the scholar Pantanaeus founded the Catechetical School of Alexandria, described as the oldest institution of its kind in the world. Its teachers included Athenagoras, Clement, Didymus and Origen. Origen lived from 185 to 251 and is called the father of theology. The school taught more than theology. Students also studied science, mathematics and the humanities. The question-and-answer method of commentary began there. Blind scholars used wood carving to read and write, some fifteen centuries before Braille.

  Out in the desert, Egyptians built another institution. Anthony the Great, who lived from 251 to 356, stands among the early monastic figures alongside Paul of Thebes, Macarius the Great, Pachomius the Cenobite and Shenouda the Archimandrite. By the end of the 5th century, hundreds of monasteries and thousands of cells and caves were scattered across the desert. Pilgrims came from all over the world to imitate the disciplined lives of the Desert Fathers.

  Basil the Great visited Egypt around 357 AD, and his monastic rules are still followed by the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, passed through around 400 AD on his way to Jerusalem and described his experiences in his letters. In the 6th century, Benedict founded the Benedictine Order on the model of Pachomius, though in a stricter form. Worldwide Christian monasticism traces back to Egypt, directly or indirectly. Copts also have a reputation as missionaries, credited with spreading the faith as far as Switzerland, Abyssinia and India.

  The first three ecumenical councils of Christianity were each headed by an Egyptian patriarch. At Nicaea in 325 AD, Pope Alexander I of Alexandria presided alongside Hosius of Córdoba. The most prominent figure there was Athanasius, a future Patriarch of Alexandria, who played the major role in shaping the Nicene Creed. Most Christian churches recite that creed today. The council also entrusted the Patriarch of Alexandria with calculating and announcing the date of Easter each year. Pope Timothy I of Alexandria presided at Constantinople in 381 AD, and Pope Cyril of Alexandria at Ephesus in 431 AD. Twenty years after Ephesus came a fourth council, and it would split the Egyptian church from the empire.

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• 5. Chalcedon and Conquest

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  At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, the assembled bishops condemned, deposed, exiled and replaced Dioscorus I, the native Patriarch of Alexandria. The Egyptian delegation rejected the council, and with it, by extension, the entire native population. The Church of Alexandria had held jurisdiction over all of Egypt and the whole African continent. Now it divided in two. The part that accepted the decrees became the Chalcedonian church, which survives as the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria. The part that rejected them, followed by the vast majority of native Copts, became the predecessor of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

  Outsiders have often called that church Monophysite, a label it rejects, calling itself Miaphysite instead. Its doctrine became a badge of nationalism for native Egyptians. The groundwork had been laid earlier. In the 4th century, the emperor Constantine the Great persecuted and exiled Athanasius, and that story made him the embodiment of the church's Egyptian character. Later patriarchs were repeatedly portrayed as defenders of the truth against outsiders.

  After the reign of Justinian I in the 6th century, the church's Egyptian character reached its zenith. Byzantine emperors repeatedly deposed and exiled non-Chalcedonian patriarchs and imposed pro-Chalcedonian ones, most of them not Egyptian. Egyptians hardened their position and refused any compromise short of full condemnation of Chalcedon. During the same period the Coptic language grew more visible in daily life.

  In 641 AD, Arab Muslim forces conquered Egypt after defeating the Byzantine army. The historian Roger S. Bagnall describes a new system of governance built around fiscal exploitation and the extraction of resources, especially through taxation. Alfred J. Butler records that parts of Alexandria were damaged as the Arabs entered, including some walls and several burned churches. In the early years, Copts faced new taxes, forced labor for state projects, and the appropriation of agricultural and technical resources. The Nile Valley and the country's skilled workers in shipbuilding and irrigation held strategic value for the new rulers.

  By the early 8th century, Butler writes, entire villages had to supply annual quotas of workers for palaces and mosques in Fustat, Damascus and Jerusalem. Men conscripted for naval expeditions rarely returned home. Christians also paid the jizya, a tax levied only on non-Muslims. Aziz Suryal Atiya notes that under the Umayyads it was extended even to monks, despite earlier pledges of exemption.

  Many Copts gradually converted to Islam. These converts were classed as Mawali, non-Arab Muslims who at first held a lower status than Arab Muslims. They had to adopt Arabic as their main language but stayed fluent in Coptic, creating a growing bilingual group among Egyptian Muslims. Others resisted. The Bashmurian revolts, the most famous, ran from 720 to 832. Poor Copts also borrowed from richer neighbors or fled their lands for other parts of Egypt.

  Egypt nonetheless stayed mainly Christian for about 800 years, and many cities in Upper Egypt had no Muslim community at all. Under a succession of regimes, from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Fatimids, Mamluks and Ottomans, churches were closed or demolished and some Copts were forced to convert. Coptic Christians lost their majority status only after the 14th century.

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• 6. Nationalism and Reform

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  At Versailles in 1919, the Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghlul met Arab delegates and insisted that Egypt's cause was not theirs. The problem of Egypt, he said, was an Egyptian problem and not an Arab one. When the British exiled him to Malta that year, Copts including Wissa Wassef and George Khayat went with him. After his return, Wissa Wassef, Sinout Hanna, Wassef Ghali, Morcos Hanna and Makram Ebeid joined him in forming a strong opposition to British rule. In 1921, when Zaghlul was sent to the Seychelles, Makram Ebeid was exiled with him.

  The exiles helped galvanize the protests that culminated in the 1919 revolution. Fakhri 'Abd al-Nur, one of the best-known Coptic figures of that revolution, recalled in his memoirs the effect of Zaghlul's declaration of "equal responsibilities and equal rights" for Copts and Muslims. The revolution's preacher was a Coptic priest, Father Morcos Sergius, whom the British had already exiled in 1915. Egypt gained independence from Britain and the Ottoman Empire on the 28th of February 1922.

  The roots of that stance run back more than a century. When Napoleon conquered Egypt in 1798, the Coptic community raised a military unit, the Coptic Legion, to defend itself against the Mamluks, the Ottomans and Egyptian Muslims. General Yaqub, a Copt, led it and recruited young men from Cairo and Upper Egypt. French army instructors trained them, and with the Greek Legion the unit formed the Bataillon des Chasseurs d'Orient. Its members sailed to France with the French army in 1801. Yaqub is considered the founder of the first modern project for Egypt's independence from the Ottomans. He argued from a nationalist standpoint, praising the country's past glory and the debt humanity owes to its ancient culture.

  Under the Ottomans, Copts were grouped with the Syriac Orthodox and the Church of the East peoples inside the Armenian millet. They paid special taxes, had less access to political power, and were exempt from military service. In the early 19th century, Muhammad Ali abolished the jizya and let Copts enroll in the army. Pope Cyril IV, who reigned from 1854 to 1861, reformed the church and urged broader Coptic participation in Egyptian affairs. Khedive Isma'il Pasha, in power from 1863 to 1879, appointed Copts as judges and granted them political rights and representation.

  Two cultural landmarks followed in the 20th century: the Coptic Museum in 1910 and the Higher Institute of Coptic Studies in 1954. Thinkers of the period included Salama Moussa and Louis Awad. In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser led army officers in a coup against King Farouk and founded a republic built on pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. His nationalizations hit Copts hard. His pan-Arab policies also cut against the Copts' attachment to a pre-Arab Egyptian identity. Many Copts still see Arab identity as closely bound to Islam, even as they share a national identity with other Egyptians.

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• 7. Language, Calendar and Chant

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  In the early 19th century, Coptic proved instrumental in Champollion's deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Coptic is the most recent stage of the Egyptian language, though strictly the name belongs to the script. That script appeared as far back as the 1st century BC and has been used to write Egyptian from the 1st century AD to the present. Coptic remained a literary language until the 13th century. Egyptian Arabic in Lower Egypt and Sa'idi Arabic in Upper Egypt supplanted it toward the 16th century. It stayed part of the education of well-bred Copts until the middle of the 17th century.

  Today Coptic is extinct as a spoken tongue, but it remains the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Churches. Many prestigious institutions teach it worldwide, though teaching inside Egypt is limited. Its dialects include Sahidic, also called Theban or Upper Egyptian, and Bohairic, the dialect of the Nile Delta and of the medieval and modern church. The others are Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, Fayyumic and Oxyrhynchite.

  The Coptic calendar began with a reform of the ancient Egyptian one. At the time of Ptolemy III, the Decree of Canopus of 238 BC added a sixth extra day every fourth year. Egyptian priests opposed it, and nothing changed until 25 BC, when the Roman emperor Augustus formally reformed the calendar, keeping it synchronized with the Julian calendar. The result has 13 months. Twelve have 30 days each, and a final month has 5 or 6 days, depending on the leap year. Farmers across Egypt still use it to track the agricultural seasons. The year retains the ancient division into three seasons of four months each, and the Coptic liturgy commemorates each season with special prayers.

  The Feast of Neyrouz marks the new year, on the first day of the month of Thout. For the years 1901 to 2098, it usually falls on the 11th of September in the Gregorian calendar. Years are counted from 284 AD, when Diocletian became Roman emperor. His reign brought tortures and mass executions of Christians, especially in Egypt. For that reason the Coptic year carries the abbreviation A.M., for Anno Martyrum, the Year of the Martyrs. Ethiopia uses the same calendar as its official one, under different names.

  Coptic music is sung and played in the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Churches. It consists mainly of chanted hymns in rhythm, with cymbals of two sizes and the triangle. Such percussion is unusual in Christian liturgy. Similar instruments appear in ancient Egyptian frescoes and reliefs, so some believe they are a survival from a very old tradition. A hymn sung on Good Friday may derive from melodies that ancient Egyptian priests used in royal funerary rites. Byzantine and Hebrew influences were added over time. For thousands of years the music passed from singer to singer by ear, and only recently have written notes and books recorded it.

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• 8. Copts Today

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  In 2023, Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria put the number of Copts in Egypt at about 15 million out of 105 million people, roughly 14 percent. He said the figure came from records of baptisms, marriages and deaths. Independent checks are hard, because Egyptian authorities forbid researchers to ask a survey participant's religion. Around 2019, Copts were generally understood to be about 10 percent of the population, or 9.5 to 10 million people. Cited ranges run from 6 percent to 18 percent, with the government estimating lower numbers and the church higher. The pope added that another 2 million Copts live in about 100 countries. In Egypt, they are most concentrated around Asyut, Minya, Sohag and Qena, with some districts of Cairo and Alexandria.

  As of 2016-36 percent of Egyptian Christians had finished university, among the highest rates in the Middle East and North Africa. Copts were widely employed as accountants in government offices, and by the 1960s they reportedly owned 51 percent of the country's banks. In the mid-20th century, Christians were estimated to make up 45 percent of Egypt's doctors and 60 percent of its pharmacists. The Sawiris family, through its Orascom conglomerate, became a prominent business dynasty in the early 2000s, and in 2008 Forbes estimated their combined wealth at 36 billion dollars. Yet most Copts live in Upper Egypt, far from the national core cities, often in blue-collar jobs. They have limited representation in the security agencies that dominate national politics.

  Egypt's constitution guarantees religious freedom, but in practice it is restricted. Until 2005, even minor church repairs needed presidential approval. The 2016 Church Construction Law eased the rules, and thousands of churches have since been legalized. Violence has still marked recent decades. The El-Kosheh clashes of 1999-2000 left 21 dead, and attacks struck Alexandria churches in 2006 and Marsa Matrouh in 2010. After the 2013 ousting of President Mohamed Morsi, at least 45 churches were attacked. The Open Doors World Watch List moved Egypt from 25th place out of 50 in 2013 to 40th in 2025.

  The diaspora began to build churches in the 1960s. Saint Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Toronto, built in 1964, was the first Coptic Orthodox church in North America, and Jersey City, New Jersey, followed shortly afterward. By 2018 the United States had more than 250 Coptic churches and an estimated 500,000 Copts. Canada had about 50,000 by 2017, with more than 80 percent in Ontario. The first Coptic Orthodox priest reached Australia in 1969. France has Europe's largest community, at about 45,000.

  Sudan and Libya tell harder stories. In Sudan, hundreds of Copts lost civil service and judicial posts after the National Islamic Front seized power, and Christians suffered intensified persecution in the civil war that began in 2023. In 2015, the Islamic State beheaded twenty Copts in Libya. The video of their execution drew international attention, and both the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church canonized them.

  A 2020 study compared DNA from 200 unrelated people, split equally between Egyptian Muslims and Egyptian Christians from locations across Egypt. It found strong genetic correlation and no significant differentiation. Its authors concluded that both groups come from the same ancestral population.

  Pope Shenouda III died on the 17th of March 2012. On the 4th of November that year, a blindfolded boy at St Mark's Cathedral in Cairo drew Bishop Tawadros's name from a glass bowl holding three shortlisted candidates. That draw made Tawadros the pope whose 2023 estimate opened this chapter.

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