\paperw4260 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 After its conquest by Alexander the Great, Egypt was dominated by a Greek-speaking ruling class. Yet the old Pharaonic culture continu
ed to survive, both in the figurative arts and in the use of the language and traditional scripts.\par
Around the middle of the first century AD Christianity reached Egypt. The holy scriptures of the new religion were written in Greek, which was not und
erstood by the whole population in Egypt, especially in the countryside.\par
Thus it was necessary to translate the holy scriptures into the native tongue. The difficulty of transcribing the Bible in hieroglyphic characters led to the creation of a new
script. This was an adaptation of the Greek alphabet so that it could be used to express the Egyptian language.\par
This script is called Coptic. The Egyptian Christians are also known as Copts.\par
The name derives from Arabic. When the Arabs conquere
d Egypt in 640 AD, the country was completely Christian. The Arabs used the Greek term \i aigyptos\i0 for the country, which became \i qubt\i0 in Arabic phonetics and it is from this that the word Copt has come.\par
Egyptian Christianity assumed parti
cularly austere characteristics, giving rise to the phenomenon of monasticism. In 451 the Egyptian church split with the rest of the Christian community: in fact the Egyptians upheld the Monophysite doctrine, which recognized only the divine nature of Ch
