The writer believes that the Coptic language is not dead except by the linguistic convention that a language is dead if it has ceased to be spoken in the daily life of the people. Coptic, is however, still alive in the churches of Egypt, and is classified as a liturgical language, similar to Latin and Hebrew before Hebrew was revived after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Anyway, the writer will use the term ‘Coptic language death’ technically in order to be able to discuss its place in what Linguists call “the type of language death”.
Linguists, like Lyle Campbell and Martha C. Muntzel,[1] commonly speak of four language death situations. These situations constitute different types, different processes of language death. The study of these situations is important not only as a descriptive matter of how the language is dying (obsolescing), but also because by knowing how and why a particular language is dying the linguists can predict with a significant degree of precision the structural changes that would be expected to affect the endangered language as it is spoken by those who still speak it with decreasing levels of fluency. Such structural changes can affect all components of the language, its phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon. Knowing how a language has died can inform us on the changes that entered in it as a consequence of, e.g., its contact with the dominant language; but, also, knowing what structural changes have occurred in a dying/dead language can inform us on the way the language was made to die.
Knowing how Coptic has died (as I already said, it is not dead, but is endangered and is in a state of dying) is not only important in the field of studying its history and the way in which it was put under threat, but also it can tell us a lot about what components in its present structure, for example the much disputed values of its vowels, have been affected by the way it died and whether they are actually original in the language before it had come into contact with Arabic and the Arabs. But, at this stage, I would like to focus on studying the various situations of language death as described by linguists, and suggest what of them fit in the case of Coptic. This should have a tremendous effect, in my opinion, on the way Coptic language death is studied.
The four situations of language death, that’s the causes of their death and how they die, are four:
- Sudden language death situation
In this type of language death, the language abruptly disappears because its speakers die or are all killed or at least a significant part of them. The classical example given for this death situation is that of Tangut (Xīxià), an ancient language once spoken in the Tangut Empire (Western Xia). In 1227, Kubali Khan ordered the death of all the inhabitants of its main city, Yinchuan, because his father Genghis Khan had been killed in the course of its siege. Consequently, Tangut, almost from that moment, ceased to be spoken, though it was still on record in its enigmatic written literature. The genocide here is accompanied by cultural and lingual genocide. The reader must be careful not to think that every single speaker of the language was killed – it is enough that a large part of them is executed, together with the destruction of their community and cultural institutions, for the language to die within a short time.[2] Another example is the Tasmanian languages which were languages of the indigenous peoples of the island of Tasmania, the Aboriginal Tasmanians (the Palawa). These languages were last used for daily communication in the 1830s, although the terminal speaker (the last speaker who spoke the language), Fanny Cochrane Smith survived until 1905. These languages died because European invaders exterminated the Tasmanians in the early 19th century. A third example is the Nicoleño language, a native American Indian language spoken by an Uto-Aztecan Native American tribe who lived on San Nicolas Island, in California. In 1811 the tribe was massacred by a party of Aleuts (people inhabiting the Aleutian Islands and other islands in the Bering Sea, and parts of western Alaska) and Russian otter fur traders from Russian Alaska, and, and so, with the disappearance of the Nicoleño’s speakers, the language ceased to exist.
Here, the people suddenly die and the language dies in consequence with them.
2. Radical language death situation
Here, the language speakers stop speaking the language out of self-defence as a “a survival strategy” as Campbell and Muntzel put it. They do that as a consequence of severe political repression, often with genocide. An example of such a type of language death is what happened to Lenca, Cacaopera, and Pipil languages, three of the Indian languages of El Salvador. “In 1932, after a peasant uprising where the insurgents were thought to be ‘communist-inspired Indians’, those identified as Indians by either dress or physical features[3] were rounded up by Salvadoran soldiers and killed, 25,000 of them in an event called the matanza (‘massacre’). Even three years later, radio broadcasts and newspapers were still calling for total extermination of El Salvador’s Indian people to prevent a repetition of the revolt. Many simply stopped speaking their native languages to avoid being identified as Indians.”[4]
In this way, the Indians of Salvador lost their language – and the loss was rapid. The Indian tribes survived but they abandoned using their language so that they are not identified by their enemy and be eradicated. The change is radical.
3. Gradual language death situation
This is the commonest type of language death. Here, the language, unlike in the first two situations, takes some time to die, and hence the designation ‘gradual’. It occurs in what is called ‘language-contact situations’ between the threatened language and the dominant language (dominant because it possesses political and economic power). The gradual death is due to gradual shift to the dominant language. Before the threatened language dies, it passes into an intermediate stage of bilingualism in which the people whose language is threatened learn to speak the language that is threatening their language but at the same time still speak their language. “The dominant language comes to be employed by an ever-increasing number of individuals in a growing number of contexts where the subordinate [threatened] language was formerly used”.[5]
In this situation, fluency of the speakers of the language gets affected, leading to a situation of “proficiency continuum” determined mainly by age: while the older generation may keep their language fluency to a degree as they learn the dominant language which they initially speak proficiently, the younger generations possess greater and increasing fluency in the dominant language while their proficiency in their own language becomes increasingly imperfect, until we reach a situation in which they lose it completely.
Here, again, the people survive, as in the radical language death situation, but their language dies, although this death is prolonged and occurs over a longer period of time.
4. Bottom-to-top language death situation (or the Latinate-pattern situation”
This is the same as in the third situation, the gradual death situation, in which the language death is slow and passes through an intermediary bilingual phase before the dominant language completely replaces the threatened languages, except here the language attrition works from bottom up, causing the threatened language to die in the lower domains of life, working itself up, in government, business and work, education, and home, but retains its use in the ecclesiastical domain. This is what happened to Latin, hence the label, “Latinate-pattern”, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Coptic.
Although Campbell and Muntzel include this as one of the types of language death, I think it should be regarded as a variant of the third type, the gradual language death. Here, the language experiences pressure under the language-contact situation, passes through the bilingual phase, and the dying process is long, but the speakers resist its total demise by retaining its use in their liturgy and ritual works. It is in effect a gradual language death situation but with some resistance shown in the persistent use of the language in their higher domains, thereby preventing its complete death.
So, how can we describe the type of Coptic language death? What situation does Coptic fits in? Clearly, the Copts, those ethno-religious distinctive group, despite the severe oppression and persecution over fourteen centuries, are still with us, a miracle as described by many. And today, there are at least 15 million of them. Their language, however, is technically dead, as it is not spoken by the Copts in their daily life, neither at home, nor at work and in business, nor used in education or in the administration of Egypt, though it still lives in the ecclesiastical domain.
Let us start by excluding sudden language death – which implies the extinction of the language speakers – as a situation befitting the type of death that the Coptic language has suffered, but we shall return to this later. There remain two situations: the radical language death and the gradual language death (I add the bottom-up situation to the latter) situations. Which pattern of death did the Coptic language experience?
Most scholars have focused on the study of the gradual language-shift from Coptic to Arabic over a few centuries since the Islamic Conquest of Egypt in 640 AD. Here we have the following pattern:
- An occupying power, with a different language (Arabic) invades Egypt and seizes political power and the economic sources in it;
- They oppress the occupied people (the Copts) and persecute them;
- Their language, being the language of the state and political and economic power becomes the dominant language;
- The language of the occupied (Coptic) becomes subordinate and threatened because of the language contact situation between Arabic and Coptic;
- This result in inevitable language shift, whereby Coptic gradually gives way to Arabic, and the occupied people learn Arabic to get-by with their lives;
- An intermediate situation arises in which the Copts learn Arabic while they still retain their national Coptic language;
- This situation ends by almost a complete shift and the death of language in all domains except the ecclesiastical.
All Coptologists and linguists agree that this is largely what happened to the Coptic language in its contact with Arabic; however, they still debate the timing of when this language shift from Coptic to Arabic had started and when it was virtually completed. In these two points they differ; and on these two points, research is still on-going and the jury is still out.
Linguists agree, as Walt Wolfram says, that “the various types of processes [of language death] are not mutually exclusive so that, for example, a language undergoing gradual language death may suddenly disappear due to changes in social and political circumstances, or going through radical language death may actually be maintained covertly while it is not used in public interaction.”[6] It is with such understanding that I would like to propose a mixed pattern of Coptic language death situation.
First of all, it is faulty to look at the demise of Coptic as simply a question of contact between Coptic and Arabic, as one would look, for example, at the voluntary shift from Spanish to English in Latino immigrant communities in the cities of the U.S., such as Chicago, who wanted to improve their prospects for education and jobs. The causes of the demise of languages can be a whole host of factors, beautifully listed by Campbell:
“Discrimination, repression, rapid population collapse, lack of economic opportunities, on-going industrialization, rapid economic transformations, work patterns, migrant labor, communication with outside regions, resettlement, dispersion, migration, literacy, compulsory education, official language policies, military service, marriage patterns, acculturation, cultural destruction, war, slavery, famine, epidemics, religious proselytizing, resource depletion and forced changes in subsistence patterns, lack of social cohesion, lack of physical proximity among speakers, symbolism of the dominant language …, stigmatization, low prestige of the dying variety, absence of institutions that establish norms (schools, academics, texts), particular historical events, etc.”[7]
Coptologists and Linguists who study the Coptic language largely ignore the fact that multiple causes had led to the demise of Coptic (in fact the Copts have seen in their history with Islam almost all the factors listed above apart from, perhaps, industrialization), and it wasn’t only a question of simple lingual contact between the prestigious Arabic of the new rulers and the subordinate Coptic of the masses, or that the Copts simply wanted to speak Arabic for reasons of “social mobility” as the Latino immigrants in the U.S. did. To understand how Coptic collapsed, it is important to study not only the signposts of the lingual shift, such as the making of Arabic in 706 obligatory for all administrative offices, the transfer of the Patriarchate to Cairo in the times of Patriarch Christodoulos (1046 – 1077) or the introduction of Arabic into the Coptic liturgy by Patriarch Gabriel II (1131 – 1145), but also the history of the recurrent assaults on the Copts, and their language – some of them were chronic in nature, others took the nature of acute-on-chronic – that resulted from Muslim oppression and misrule but sometimes were caused by natural disasters, such as the frequent famines and epidemics in Islamic Egypt.
Muslim oppression, there is no doubt about it; and although Orientalists and Arabists, such as Gaston Wiet,[8] try to minimise the effect of that, it is a matter of historical fact that is impossible to deny that Arab and Muslim (in this I include all non-Arabs who ruled Egypt since the Muslim Conquest of Egypt in the seventh century) have inflicted great harm and damage on the Copts and their communities, heritage, culture and language. I am not going to get into detailing that, but a pattern of oppression, acute-on-chronic, can be detected throughout the last fourteen centuries. Historians focus on the acute episodes, forgetting about the chronic, long-term oppression which was always in the background. But the acute episodes, which started right from the beginning of the Islamic era until this day, may help in explain the nature of this severe oppression. It is impossible to mention or detail all these, but a few will be sufficient: the cruel suppression of the Bashmourite Revolt in 829 – 832, the persecution by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847 – 861), the persecution by the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim (996 – 1021), the persecution by the Ayyubid Caliph Saladin (1171 – 1193), the repeated persecutions by the Mamelukes in 1279, 1283, 1301, 1321, 1354, 1419, 1422, 1447.
The Mameluke persecutions drew the attention of many scholars in view of their particular harshness, but one has to mention particularly the works of Perlmann (1942),[9] Jacques Tagher (1942),[10] Little (1976),[11] and O’Sullivan (2006).[12] The reader must consult these works to start to feel how it was like. These persecutions are significant not only because of their special ferocious nature, with widespread pogroms and wholesale destruction of Coptic temporary, educational and spiritual communities, in which the Egyptian Muslim mobs and their rulers contributed, but also because they were as described by Wiet had given “the coup de grâce to Christianity in Egypt,” “which ceased to mean anything but a number of individuals.”[13] It is impossible to imagine the distress and terror that overtook the Copts throughout the Mameluk period (1250 – 1517), and forced them to try to hide their identity by assimilating as much as possible to the Muslims in order to avoid the persecution. No nation, in my view, has experienced such a ferocious persecution over so many centuries as the Copts, except, possibly, what the Jews experienced in WWII.
Wiet, in his prejudice, says:
“The Arabs imposed upon Egypt a treaty, of which Tabari claims to give the accurate text which must be compared with the similar treaties concluded in other countries. The Christians of Egypt were treated like the other non-Muslims (ahl al-dhimma) of the growing Arab Empire. They had to pay a personal tax (djizya), fixed in Egypt at two dinars for each adult male, in recognition of which they enjoyed the protection of the Muslims (dhimma). This statement is found throughout the Arab literature, but the papyri show it is inaccurate, in as much as the tax was proportionate to one’s fortune. In a word, this regime was at first the prototype of the modern protectorate; the Muslim government assured the Christians of protection for themselves and for their property; those who did not receive a share in the distribution of the diwan were not obliged to give military service.”[14]
He would be honest if he had written that rather than the Muslim regime being “prototype of the modern protectorate” it was actually a protection racket that was uninvited, and unwelcome. It was akin to the protection that a wolf offers the sheep in preventing other wolves from devouring them, for that function should be the sole privilege of the Muslim wolf. But all this I use here just to emphasise the significant role that this has had on the Coptic language, through discrimination, repression, depopulation, migration from villages and towns, dispersion, impoverishing, restriction of economic opportunities, sacking of Coptic officials, rapid economic decline, murder and in some cases attempts at genocide, cutting communication with the outside, destruction of spiritual institutions, destruction of social services institutions, destruction of educational facilities and opportunities (schools were attached to churches), imposition of Arabic as official language, cultural destruction, wars, slavery, famine through mismanagement, religious proselytising and Islamisation, resource depletion and forced changes in subsistence patterns, lack of social cohesion, lack of physical proximity among speakers, symbolism of the dominant language, stigmatization, low prestige of the dying variety, absence of institutions that establish norms (schools, academics, texts), etc. It is important for any individual studying the history of Coptic to understand the devastating effect of Muslim acute-on-chronic nature of Muslim oppression, which gave rise to these, on the chances of Coptic to survive.
But Arab and Muslim oppression of the Copts was not the sole agent for the demise of Coptic – natural disasters have had their great effect too. While a fall in rainfall in the heights of Ethiopia cannot be blamed on the Arab and Muslim authorities ruling Egypt – rainfall that gave rise to low Niles, which in their turn resulted in famines, rise in the cost of living and epidemics – the Arab and Muslim successive governments, through their greed, injustice, neglect of the irrigation systems, and their utter incompetence could fairly be blamed for contributing to the effects of these natural disasters.
The effect of the plague epidemics, bubonic or respiratory, on the Copts, their communities, their population size, their resources and the chances of their language survival has not yet been studied. On this matter, reading the works of Michael Dols, Boaz Shoshan and Stuart Borsch is essential to understand the effect of the recurring cycles of plagues in Egypt, starting from the Black Death in 1348-1350 until 1844, had had on the depopulation of Egypt, decimation of its labour force and destruction of its rural communities and economy.[15] A total of 210 outbreaks of plague are given by Borsch as in the following table:[16]
| Interval | No. of outbreaks | Frequency (yr) |
| 1348 – 1516 | 73 | 2.32 |
| 1517 – 1700 | 78 | 2.37 |
| 1701 – 1844 | 59 | 2.42 |
In the Black Death (1348 – 1350), between one-third and one-half of Egypt’s inhabitants were carried off. In Cairo, with a population of estimated 300,000, 161,888 (54%) perished; in Alexandria, with an estimated population of 105,000, 49,875 (48%) perished; in Gaza, with an estimated population of 50,000, 20,900 (42%) perished – all within four months while the plague raged. The plague did not affect humans only, as it was reported to have caused the death of cattle, horses, donkeys, dogs, cats, and even fish in the sea. The mortality rate in subsequent cycles of plague, was not lower: in the plague of 1430, for example, Cairo had an estimated population of 200,000, and 90,000 (45%) perished; in the plague of 1460, 80,000 (40% of the total Cairo population) perished. Al-Maqrizi, an eyewitness, describes the devastating effect of the 1412 outbreak:
“Alexandria was laid waste [by these troubles] and so was [the Nile Delta province of] al-Buhayra. The greater part of [the province of] al-Sharqiya was ruined, and the majority of [the two provinces] al-Gharbiya and Giza were desolated. The [province of] the Fayyum was devastated. Destruction was widespread in Upper Egypt as well – so much so that more than forty sermons that were held on Fridays were abrogated. [The intent here is to convey that more than forty villages/towns large enough to have a congregational mosque were abandoned.] the port city of Aswan was destroyed, and it was once one of the greatest Muslim port cities; now nothing remains in it of amirs, influential people, marketplaces, or houses. Most of the cities of Upper Egypt have been obliterated. Cairo and its outskirts have lost half their wealth. And two-thirds of the population of Egypt has been wiped out by famine and plague.”[17]
The high death rate caused by the successive cycles of the plague, potentiated by the effect of famines, which almost always came on its heels, led to a massive and sharp decline in Egypt’s population each time, and the recurrent nature of the plague did not allow the population to recover before another decimation struck. This resulted in severe depopulation all over Egypt, which was made worse by the panic that seized the Egyptians, leading to population flight and migration from rural areas to imagined safe havens, in the big cities, particularly Cairo, where the hope of finding rudimentary health care and charitable crumbs of bread was entertained. The provincial town in the Delta, Minuf al-‘Ulya, which was subjected to a series of outbreaks in 1403, 1407, 1430, and 1460 was said to have been completely emptied by the plague and the flight of its population. Agriculture, Egypt’s economic backbone, thus collapsed, as it lacked the necessary workforce, as peasants and labourers had either died or migrated. No one was left to gather the crops, as Muslim writers often complained. The scarcity of labour also affected the maintenance of Egypt’s irrigation system, resulting in silting up of canals and dykes as the necessary canal drudging stopped; and now even with a high Nile, reaching 19 or even 20 cubits, which would have caused overflooding previously, failed to provide adequate floodwater to agricultural lands to be cultivated.
The repugnant Mamluk response to all this destroyed what was left. “Egypt’s military elite played a role here: these elites, essentially synonymous with the urban landholding caste at this time, added to the crisis by forcing rents upwards, coercing corvée in the place of wages, redirecting irrigation-system taxes to their coffers, and in essence looting the rural economy.”[18] One can see the extent of the damage to the economy by considering what happened to, for example, the textile industry in Alexandria: in the 1300s, there were in Alexandria approximately 8,000 textile workshops – and these were mainly run by Copts – with 12,000-14,00 textile workers; in the 1400s, only 800 textile workers were reported. Alexandria which boasted over 100,000 population in the 14th century became inhabited by only 6,000 to 8,000 by the early 19th century.
Above was a quick exposition of Egypt’s demographic changes and economic collapse in the Middle Ages, particularly from the 14th century during the rule of the Mamluks. Of course, such catastrophes, brought about through the agencies of the Mamluks and natural disasters, affected all Egyptians, Copts and Muslims alike, but their effects on the Copts were greater. The combination of the severe and sustained persecution, though waning at times but in no way completely disappearing, and recurrent famines and epidemics hit the Copts badly. The effect of the persecution, in my opinion, broke the Copts’ back – it was not so much by causing apostasy to Islam (I really think that, contrary to what some scholars say, not many Copts converted to Islam) but by the widespread destruction to their sacred, social and educational institutions, destitution and marginalisation. This cruel human blow was made worse by the unkindness of nature, which again, I think affected the Copts in a special way.
There is a significant difference between Muslims and Copts that the reader must bear in mind when thinking about the depopulation and its aftermath. The Copts had a limited pool of people, and those who died of them whether through the oppression or the natural disasters, were not easily compensated – there was no Coptic population bounce back. The Muslims, on the other hand, have always had an external great population pool to draw from and to recover their numbers, and even to a higher level than the previous – immigration of Muslims into Egypt continued unabated from all over the Muslim world, particularly from the Arabia, the Maghreb, Sudan and Syria. The migration of the large Arabised Berber tribes, known collectively as Hawwara, which populated Upper Egypt starting from the 15th century is just one example. These Hawwara added to the plundering and looting of the Copts, enslaved them, and destroyed what was left in their economy and communities.[19] They had another effect: while boosting the Muslim population, they diluted the Coptic presence and thinned out their population which must have had an enormous effect on the vitality and health of their language. Polygamy and concubinage, the latter being made even more easier by the enormous, continuous slave trade from Sub-Saharan Africa, added to the upsurge in the Muslim ratio within the Egyptian population while caused the Coptic population to drop to its present ratio. It is my view that the decline in Coptic ratio in Egypt was not caused by massive conversion to Islam as some scholars have suggested but to the above-mentioned complex factors.
The depopulation, flight from villages and cities, dispersion, and the significant thinning out of the Coptic population, who found themselves surrounded by hostile Arabs and Muslims, deprived the Copts of their ability to learn, teach and communicate in Coptic. Some Coptic villages must have been emptied completely of Copts, and so we can say that Coptic disappeared completely from these communities, and in this sense, Coptic, within these localities, died in a sudden death. Those who found themselves amongst hostile Muslims, who hated and despised them, always ready to identify them in order to attack and insult them, and making sure that they adhered to the laws of Sharia, tried to hide their identity in order to avoid persecution – and perhaps the most identifying factor of a Copt was his language. It is in this way, the Copts abandoned speaking their language in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves as much as possible. And in this way, the death of the Coptic language could be said to have been a radical death too.
The phenomenon of the death of Coptic is complex and should never be looked at as a simple gradual death caused by language contact between the dominant Arabic and the subordinate Coptic. It is particularly important to avoid looking at the shift from Coptic to Arabic as a voluntary, benign one, just like that of the Latino immigrants in the U.S. who looked at it as a facilitator of social mobility. Ignoring the violence and oppression behind the shift is a great mistake.
Other ways of how Coptic had died, may be in certain locations and during certain periods, must be considered: sometimes it died in a sudden death fashion when the local Coptic population in villages and towns suddenly disappeared either by pogroms, famines or plague; other times it died radically when the Copts were exposed to severe persecutions and, as a safety mechanism, they abandoned talking in Coptic, in an effort not to be easily identifiable, and hence persecuted.
In fact, I do think that the pattern of Coptic death was acute-on-chronic: the huge persecution in the Mamluk period caused both sudden and radical patterns of death to the Coptic language; but Coptic was already suffering from a chronic, gradual sort of malady and was dying out of contact with the Arabic of the conquerors of Egypt and the oppressors of the Copts. This complex fashion in which Coptic died fits well with what Wolfram has said, that “the various types of processes [of language death] are not mutually exclusive so that, for example, a language undergoing gradual language death may suddenly disappear due to changes in social and political circumstances.”
[1] See, e.g., Lyle Campbell and Martha C. Muntzel, The Structural Consequences of Language Death in Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Ed. Nancy C. Dorian (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 181-196; and also, Walt Wolfram, Language Death and Dying in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, A Language and Linguistics Textbook edited by J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), pp. 764-787.
[2] Andrew Dalby: Language In Danger (2003), p. 215.
[3] The emphasis is mine.
[4] The Structural Consequences of Language Death, p. 183.
[5] Ibid, p. 185.
[6] Language Death and Dying, p. 766.
[7] Walt Wolfram, Language Death in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 4, ed. R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson (Oxford/New York, Pergamon, 1994). Quoted fromWalt Wolfram, Language Death and Dying in Handbook of Language Variation and Change, A Language and Linguistics Textbook edited by J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), p. 767.
[8] Gaston Wiet, “Kibt”, in the 2nd volume of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. M. Th. Houssma, A. J. Wensinck, T. W. Arnold, W. Heffening, and E. Lévi-Provençal (1927).
[9] M. Perlmann, Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamluk Empire, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Volume 10, Issue 4, February 1942, pp. 843-861.
[10] Jacques Tagher, Christians in Muslim Egypt : an historical study of the relations between Copts and Muslims from 640 to 1922. This was initially a PhD thesis submitted to the Sorbonne. It was later published in English by Altenberge : Oros, 1998.
[11] Little Donald P., Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Bahri Mamluks, 625-755/1293-1354, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 39, 1976, pp. 552-69.
[12] O’Sullivan, Shaun, Coptic Conversion and Islamization of Egypt, Mamlūk Studies Review 10 (2006): 65–79.
[13] Gaston Wiet, “Kibt”.
[14] Ibid.
[15] B Shoshan, Notes sur les épidemies de peste en Egypte, in Annales de démographie historique, 1981. Démographie historique et condition féminine. pp. 387-404; Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1977); and the following several works by Stuart Borsch: Plague Mortality in Late Medieval Cairo: Quantifying the Plague Outbreaks of 833/1430 and 864/1460 (with Tarek Sabraa) in Mamlūk Studies Review Vol. 19, 2016; Plague Depopulation and Irrigation Decay in Medieval Egypt in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, Monica Green, ed., The Medieval Globe (2014); Refugees of the Black Death: Quantifying rural migration for plague and other environmental disasters (with Tarek Sabraa) in Annales de démographie historique Volume 134, Issue 2, 2017, pages 63 to 93; The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study (Texas University Press, 2005).
[16] I use Borsch’s works extensively here, particularly in the figures I use.
[17] Maqrizi in his al-Suluk, 4:227, as translated by Stuart Borsch in his Plague Depopulation and Irrigation Decay in Medieval Egypt, p. 129.
[18] Ibid, p. 141
[19] See: Dioscorus Boles, How the Hawwara Tribe of Upper Egypt Enslaved the Copts (July 25, 2020).