By Dr Sarah Parkhouse and Professor Peter Oakes
A 1901 purchase by Enriqueta Rylands brought the Earl of Crawford’s substantial collection of Coptic manuscripts to the Library. The then recently resigned(!) Rylands librarian, Gordon Duff, wrote to Lord Crawford’s librarian: “I cannot understand why they were bought for Manchester, the one place where they will be most useless, and where there will be no one to look after them.” In terms of cataloguing, they were actually looked after brilliantly by a ‘dapper’ Coptologist, and now Manchester (and the wider UK) has gained a community for whom Coptic manuscripts are far from useless, as a recent JRRI pilot project has shown.
What are the Coptic Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library?
There are more than 470 catalogued Coptic manuscripts held at the John Rylands (see the collection description here). Among the treasures are the oldest Biblical manuscript in the Bohairic dialect of Coptic, bilingual Coptic-Greek and Coptic-Arabic texts, liturgy, martyrdoms, homilies, a paraphrase of 1 Kings with Elijah portrayed as a Christian saint, and writings by the renowned Archimandrite Shenoute. There are artefacts illustrating social history of Egypt in Late Antiquity, including magical and medical documents, a complaint about lazy builders, and contracts for a sailor’s employment, who pays for a wedding, and women selling clothes. The manuscripts offer snapshots of life of those writing in Coptic from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries.
As well as the catalogued manuscripts, there are many more again that are fragmentary and uncatalogued, long known as the Coptic “limbo” collection (comprising c. 1200 items, many of which have been digitised and put on the University’s Library Digital Collections). These are now undergoing conservation and research in a new collaboration between the John Rylands Research Institute and Library and the University of Texas at Austin (watch out for news in the coming years!).
The Journey to Manchester: Stealing Manuscripts and a Dapper Coptologist
How did these Coptic artefacts end up in Manchester? The provenance of ancient manuscripts and the history of collections is becoming increasingly important in current conversations about the ethics of studying antiquity, as shown in the recent BBC Radio programme Intrigue: Word of God, featuring Roberta Mazza examining Greek papyri in the John Rylands. Yet so far the history of the Coptic manuscripts in Manchester has been hardly studied.
Almost all the manuscripts were acquired from the Earl of Crawford. How did they get from Egypt to an elite Scottish family? The 25th Lord Crawford purchased at least a part of the Coptic collection at Sotheby’s on 16 June 1868 – manuscripts previously owned by Henry Tattam, whose name is inscribed in many of the John Rylands Coptic artefacts. Curiously, Tattam’s Coptic manuscripts appear to be the same collection that the French Coptologist, Jean Dujardin, acquired for French libraries. Alin Suciu has suggested that English travellers, perhaps Tattam himself, stole Dujardin’s collection sometime after 1838, and so they ended up in Britain instead of France.1 The 26th Lord Crawford spent time in Egypt collecting manuscripts in the 1890s, and purchased a number of manuscripts from dealers in Giza. While the manuscripts were in the hands of the Crawfords, a young Walter Crum was employed to compile a catalogue, which he completed after the purchase by John Rylands. When Crum first arrived at the Crawford’s house to study the artefacts, Crawford’s youngest son recalled that he had expected “some sage old goggled pedagogue and met instead the very opposite … .” Crum, he wrote, was actually “young and dapper”. Crum’s catalogue is recognised as a benchmark for outstanding presentation of a collection of that period.
Coptic Manuscripts and the Coptic Community
Copts are a large religious minority in Egypt, somewhere between 10% and 20% of the population. ‘Copt’ derives from the Greek, then the Arabic, for ‘Egyptian.’ Their Oriental Orthodox church dates back to the Roman period and has produced texts in Greek, Coptic and Arabic. These express the lives of the Copts under, first, Byzantine rule that favoured Greek Orthodox practices, then Arab rule. There is now a Coptic diaspora of several million, including a UK Coptic community that has grown steadily since the 1960s, currently numbering over 20,000, including prominent figures such as pioneering heart surgeon, Sir Magdy Yacoub, and more locally, Deputy Lieutenant of Cheshire, Dr Naser Fouad. The local Coptic Church in Stockport has a Sunday congregation of several hundred.
The Rylands Coptic texts are almost all Orthodox in character. That kept them out of the mainstream of 20th-century academic interest, which focused heavily on the much narrower group of Coptic texts that espoused unorthodox, often ‘gnostic’ views. As current scholarship pivots towards interest in how texts relate to communities, historical and current, it becomes pressing both to ask what light the John Rylands manuscripts shed on the history of Coptic communities and to seek to find out, in engagement with current Coptic voices, whether there are ways in which the John Rylands manuscripts can be useful for their community.
A pilot project led by Peter Oakes, Sarah Parkhouse, Jeremy Penner, and Fr John Saleeb, furthered efforts by the John Rylands researchers to make Manchester not a “useless” locale for these manuscripts, but to connect them with the local and wider UK Coptic Orthodox community. The project team surveyed the Rylands stacks and Crum’s catalogue to establish a list of manuscripts that would act as a representative sample of what could be of interest. A meeting was then held in which 16 manuscripts with descriptions and translations were showcased for invited members of the UK Coptic community: doctor and writer Ahmes Labib Pahor (Birmingham) and priests from Stockport and London (Fr Bishoy Naguib and Fr Morkos Fakhery) as well as North Wales (Fr John Saleeb). Together we examined manuscripts from the fourth to the nineteenth century all of which proved to be of considerable common interest. For instance, a Coptic medical recipe from the eleventh century containing Arabic loanwords sparked considerable discussion about whether ingredients were named in Arabic because of recession of Coptic language in the ninth century. The text also led to discussion of continuities between modern medicine and medieval medical advice, such as how it is still common in Egypt to avoid eating fish, meat, and eggs during illness.
At the meeting, we discussed possible future plans stemming from this project. The shape of these will depend on the level of resource available. There is a range of research and community engagement opportunities. A particular idea discussed was for digitisation of further Coptic manuscripts leading to a digital exhibition curated in collaboration with members of the Coptic church at Stockport, to include details on the social history of Coptic Egypt, liturgy and ritual, and the history of the manuscripts. The aim would be for this to be used as a tool for research and teaching in both academic and church settings.
Bibliography
- Malcolm Choat, “Lord Crawford’s Search for Papyri: on the Origin of the Rylands Papyrus Pollection”, in Paul Schubert (ed.) Actes du 26e Congrès international de papyrologie (Genève: Librairie Droz 2010), 141–47.
- Roberta Mazza, “Graeco-Roman Egypt at Manchester: The Formation of the Rylands Papyri Collection”, in Paul Schubert (ed.) Actes du 26e Congrès international de papyrologie (Genève: Librairie Droz 2010), 499–507.
- Alin Suciu, “The Coptic Manuscripts of Monsieur Dujardin and the Crawford Collection in the John Rylands Library, Manchester”, on Patristics, Apocrypha, Coptic Literature and Manuscripts Blog, posted December 28, 2012.
- Alin Suciu, “The Coptic Manuscripts of Monsieur Dujardin and the Crawford Collection in the John Rylands Library, Manchester”, on Patristics, Apocrypha, Coptic Literature and Manuscripts Blog, posted December 28, 2012. ↩︎