Jean-Luc Fournet Presents the Eighth Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series
Jean-Luc Fournet (Collège de France, Paris) will present this year's M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series, "Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antique Egypt: The Struggle of Coptic for an Official Status." Michael I. Rostovtzeff, a Russian ancient historian, came to the U.S. after the Russian Revolution and taught for many years at Yale University as Sterling Professor of Ancient History. Rostovtzeff’s prodigious energies and sprawling interests led him to write on an almost unimaginable range of subjects. ISAW’s Rostovtzeff series presents scholarship that embodies its aspirations to foster work that crosses disciplinary, geographical, and chronological lines. The lectures will be published by Princeton University Press.
All lectures are presented at 6pm and require an RSVP here.
March 22, Rostovtzeff Lecture I: An Egyptian Exception?
During the first three centuries of its history, Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language written with Greek letters, was only used for literary purposes and private correspondence but not for contracts between individuals, documents sent by individuals to the authorities, or internal administrative communication—areas in which the Greek language had a monopoly. This situation is unique in comparison with what is observed in other provinces of the Roman Empire and cannot be explained by a legal prohibition.
March 29, Rostovtzeff Lecture II: Why Was Greek Preferred to Coptic?
This lecture will outline several possible reasons for the late development of official Coptic. Possible reasons include the nature of the language itself, the prestige enjoyed by the Greek language, the milieu of Coptic’s creation, and the longstanding distrust of the Greek-speaking State towards the legal use of Egyptian.
April 5, Rostovtzeff Lecture III: The Rise of Legal Coptic and the Byzantine State
In the middle of the 6th century, Coptic began to be used in a limited way for some documents other than purely private letters or accounts. Cultural and political considerations may account for the progressive use of Coptic for legal documents, but the key to this linguistic revolution must be sought in the situation of the judicial state institutions after Justinian and before the Arab Conquest.
April 12, Rostovtzeff Lecture IV: The Role of the Church in the Growth of Legal Coptic
This lecture will present an unpublished set of wooden tablets from Panopolis (now in the Louvre) attesting the use of Coptic for tax receipts in the 6th century and revisit the archive of Apa Abraam bishop of Hermonthis (c. 595-621) and of the monastery he founded—the largest group of legal Coptic texts prior to the Arab Conquest. These texts will lead us to examine the role of the Church and especially monasticism in the development of Coptic for official transactions.
Jean-Luc Fournet is a papyrologist and a specialist in late antiquity. In March 2015, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France (Paris), which created for him its first chair of papyrology named “Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology.” Prior to his current position, he was a scientific member of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale in Cairo (1992-1996), researcher at the CNRS in Strasbourg (1996-2004), and professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Department of Historical and Philological Sciences) in Paris (2004-2015). He devotes much of his scholarly activity to editing new texts, including papyri and Greek inscriptions on late antique amphorae, which he was the first to decipher, and has a special interest in the culture of late antiquity—particularly poetry, multilingualism, and modalities of written culture.
Photo: Patrick Imbert, Collège de France