About: | Bernhard Palme |
Position: | Key Researcher |
Node: | Communication and Mobility |
With two major waves of immigration (Greeks from the 4th c. BCE, Arabs from the late 7th c. CE), Egypt became a multilingual country of remarkable cultural diversity and radiance on three continents during the ‘papyrological millennium’ (c. 300 BCE–700 CE) and beyond. While the majority of the population, especially the simple people in the countryside, still spoke Egyptian, since the Hellenistic epoch the language of the administration and the social elite was Greek; in the Roman Empire, Latin was used as the command language of the military. After the Arab conquest, Greek was slowly replaced by Arabic in administration, while Arabic prevailed over Coptic, the lingua franca of the population, only centuries after the Arab conquest; Coptic remained the language of Christians. Based on the rich papyrological evidence, this research line will examine the use of the languages in the multilingual societies of Hellenistic to Arabic Egypt. The focus is on the written interaction between the state and the individual. How does the ruler or governor of a multilingual country communicate with its subjects? In which areas are authorised translations used? Which languages are permitted in private legal transactions and which languages were used for jurisdiction? In particular, the approval of Demotic documents in Ptolemaic and early Roman Egypt and the role of Coptic documents in early Arab Egypt promise information about how ancient empires communicated with multilingual societies. An essential approach to these questions will be the study of bilingual texts. In addition to the papyrological evidence, epigraphic sources (which are few in number on this question) will be consulted as comparative material. This broad approach, which goes beyond the traditional framework of papyrology, goes hand in hand with the foundation of a Commission for Papyrology, which Palme initiated at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and aims to establish links with pertinent research endeavours in other disciplines.