Bilingualism in Roman Egypt? Exploring the Archive of Phatres of Narmuthis*

Abstract

Abstract By the Roman period Greek had gradually replaced Demotic as the language of administration in Egypt.1 Demotic still throve as the language of Egyptian religion and cultural tradition— ‘script death ‘2 did not come until the fourth century—but it was probably practised exclusively by a small number of priests in temples, and all of them were probably literate in Greek as well.3 For most of the population, as Bagnall puts it, ‘there was no way to have an Egyptian sentence recorded except to translate it into Greek ‘.4 The Demotic language for its part had proved quite resistant to influence from Greek: loan words show up in only a small number of contexts,5 and A version of this chapter was also presented at the multilingualism colloquium at Oxford in September 2006. I thank all those who commented on either version, especially Roger Bagnall, John Lee, and Sebastian Richter.

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