I have written about Yuhanna Chiftichi a few times. He was a Coptic priest who was born in the eighteenth century, and fought with the French against the Turks, Mamluks and Arabs during the French Campaign in Egypt (1798 – 1801) side by side with General Ya’aqub.
After the French withdrew from Egypt in 1801, he left to France with them. There, he landed in Marseille and seems to have gone early to Paris where he lived until 1825. After that, he returned to Marseille where he most probably died there. In Paris, Chiftichi lodged first at the Rue de la Concorde, where the Needle of Rameses II now stands, and the Rue Royale. During that period, he was working as priest officiating at the old Church of Saint Roch that is located at 284 Rue Saint-Honoré. Later, he moved to live in Rue Roche; and it seems that is where Champollion visited him to learn Coptic. Apparently, he continued to live there until he moved to Marseille in 1825.
While he was in Paris, his erudition and knowledge of Coptic and Arabic made him indispensable to two main French projects that added much to human civilisation: first, The Description of Egypt (Description de l’Ėgypte); and, second, the deciphering of Hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822.
For a long time, I was wondering what ‘chiftichi’ could be. It sounded odd, and no Copt nowadays carry this surname. In those days Coptic names are usually referred to the villages or towns where their families (so, al-Touki, al-Meeri, al-Manqabadi, etc.) came from or to their profession (so, Jawhari, al-Hawi, al-Khashaba, etc.). Chiftich (the root of chiftichi, with the ‘i’ being the possessive article) does not seem to be a name of any geographical locality in Egypt. It must have been indicative then to what his family was famous for in their profession.
An earring shiftish’eh
The origin of the word ‘chiftichi’ is Turkish: kafes işi. It means filigree, lacework. In the Ottoman Empire, which occupied Egypt in 1517, the profession of metal filigree was introduced; and it involved mainly intricate metalwork used in jewellery, using metallic twisted threads of copper, silver and gold soldered together in an open fashion but sometimes over the surface of an object of the same metal. They were arranged in artistic motifs, and used mainly by women. Edward William Lane, in his An account of the manner and customs of the modern Egyptians: written in Egypt during the years, 1833-1835, speaks in Chapter XXXI (Egyptian Female Ornaments) about the elaborate ways Egyptian women of that time used to beautify their hair with metallic ornaments. One of these was the ‘shiftish’eh’ (شِّفْتِيشَة), which he says was composed of open gold work, with pearl in the centre.[1]
It seems, therefore, that Yohanna’s Chiftichi’s surname was ‘الشِّفْتِيشَي’ and was taken from his family’s craft of making metallic filigree. His name would have been ‘يُوْحَنَّا الشِّفْتِيشَي’, translated into French as ‘Yuhanna Chiftichi’.
[1] An account of the manner and customs of the modern Egyptians : written in Egypt during the years, 1833-1835 (London, Alexander Gardner, 1895), p. 568.