Online resources

Web sites of general interest

1. Omniglot - Writing Systems and Languages of the World
   This site, published by a passionate polyglot and self-taught British citizen by the name of Simon Ager, is not affiliated with any institution. It provides a good level of general information about an impressive number of writing scripts in the world, with links to other sites.
   
2. Coptica
   A personal site, edited by Dr Pierre Cherix, with much useful material organized in several sections, including a bibliographic section, news and a geographical section devoted to Coptic sites. Links to texts published in Coptic, divided into literary texts (biblical, Apostolic Fathers, apocrypha, Gnostic and Manichaean, ecclesiastical decrees, liturgical, hagiography and homiletics, catalogs and miscellaneous texts) and documentary and magical texts are of particular interest. The documents section contains useful links to texts on language, history, geography, art and archaeology, early Christianity, Manichaeism, Coptic liturgy, and encyclopedias.
   

Online documents

1. Duke Papyrus Archive (Coptic)
   The Coptic section of the site of the Duke Papyrus Collection provides a great number of examples of documents divided in literary and sub-literary texts and documents, with an internal chronological organization. Every document is provided with a high-resolution image and cataloguing information.
   
2. Coptic Scriptorium
   Coptic SCRIPTORIUM (Sahidic Corpus Research: Internet Platform for Interdisciplinary multilayer Methods) is a collaborative digital project by Caroline T. Schroeder (University of the Pacific) and Amir Zeldes (Humboldt University). The project provides a platform for searching Coptic (Sahidic dialect) texts. It is an open-source, open-access tool that relies on the collaboration of Coptologist users and allows display and search on a large corpus of Coptic texts through a variety of tools.

   
3. PSI - Papiri della Società Italiana
   The PSI on-line project publishes on-line papyri, scrolls and ostraca of the PSI series, particularly the documents preserved at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the Vitelli Papyrological Institute and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The entries offer rich descriptions of the documents (provenance, date, author, collection, contents, etc.) with high-resolution photography. The project is edited by the University of Cassino, Accademia Fiorentina di Papirologia, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Vitelli Papirological Institute, Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

   
4. The Gospel of Thomas Resource Center
   Site devoted to Naga Hammadi's Codex II (among which is the "Gospel of Thomas"): there is an English interlinear translation of the Gospel of Thomas and a concordance of this text, more English translations of texts from Codex II, a selected bibliography on the Gospel of Thomas, and selected resources for the general study of Codex II.
   

Institutions, centers for study and research

1. Deir al Surian Projects - The Levantine Foundation
   The Levantine Foundation is running a fundraising campaign for projects on preservation and cataloguing of the materials in the library of the Syrian Monastery (Deir el Surian), Wadi Natrun. In addition to restoration, there are training and education projects.
   

Study and research centers

1. International Association for Coptic Studies
   The IACS was founded in occasion of the 1st International Congress of Coptology in Cairo in 1976, with the aim of encouraging and contributing to the progress of all aspects of Coptic Studies.
   

Academic materials

1. St. Takla
   Amatorial site, online since 1997, by Michael Ghaly. Here it is of interest only for the Coptic lessons and for the registrations, useful for those interested in phonetics. The site also offers more generic information and links, dedicated to the Coptic Church, with photographic galleries, a sort of hymnography, links of interest to Coptic clergy, etc.
   
2. The St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society
   The Society, founded in 1979 in Los Angeles as a meeting place for the Coptic communities outside Egypt, offers a series of functions not strictly of interest to Coptic language and writing. This link, all the same, leads to 12 lessons of Coptic with a final exam; browsing the main site users can find manyadditional links and downloadable fonts.
   
3. Pisakho - The Great Scribe
   An amateur site with pages devoted to educational links, bibliographic suggestions and a few downloadable articles. The site makes heavy use of Coptic (there are instructions for downloading and making the fonts visible), with a section entirely in Coptic.

   
4. Concordance of the Sahidic New Testament - Alin Suciu
   Concordances of the Sahidic version of the New Testament, published in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium series: LEFORT L.-TH., Concordance du Nouveau Testament sahidique, I. Les mots d’origine grecque (CSCO, 124. Subsidia, 1), Imprimerie orientaliste L. Durbecq, Louvain 1950. WILMET M., Concordance du Nouveau Testament sahidique, II. Les mots autochtones, 1 (CSCO, 173. Subsidia, 11), Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, Louvain 1957. WILMET M., Concordance du Nouveau Testament sahidique, II. Les mots autochtones, 2 (CSCO, 183. Subsidia, 13), Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, Louvain 1958. WILMET M., Concordance du Nouveau Testament sahidique, II. Les mots autochtones, 3 (CSCO, 185. Subsidia, 15), Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, Louvain 1959.

   
5. Coptic Research - UK Coptic Research Centre
   Page rich in content and services, edited by Dr Howard Middleton-Jones. In addition to a rich and valuable photo gallery, the site offers the possibility to take online courses in Coptology, with a mainly art-historical content, but also with some linguistic insight.
   
6. St. Shenouda Electronic Institute of Coptic Studies (SSEICS)
   The institute offers a very rich variety of online courses for a fee. These are courses that may be individual or aimed at acquiring a certificate at university level, devoted to Coptic language, literature, culture, art and archaeology.
   
7. Iryan Moftah Coptic Language and Religion Manuscripts
   Manuscripts by Iryan Moftah (1826-1886), a Coptic language specialist who was active under the reformer papacy of Cyril IV, kept in the Library of the American University in Cairo. Among them there are his publications and a number of grammar texts he used in his lessons.
   

Images

1. Nag Hammadi Archive - Claremont Colleges Digital Library
   Important collection of images from the codices of the Nag Hammadi Library. This is the series of negatives (J-Series) made by Basile Psiroukis in September 1973 and representing an earlier and different set of photographs than the canonical edition.
   
2. The Digital Library of Inscriptions and Calligraphies - Bibliotheca Alexandrina
   Galleries of images with brief (sometimes inaccurate) descriptive cards; the inscriptions are organized by supports (architecture, textiles, jewelry, furniture, etc.) and not by writing system, which is a good reason to browse through the galleries looking for Coptic, Demotic, Hieratic and Hieroglyphic inscriptions. Edited by the Library of Alexandria, which has become a center for digital humanities whose projects, however, do not always live up to expectations.
   

Texts

1. PLUMLEY M., An Introductory Coptic Grammar (Sahidic Dialect), 1948
   "Original mimeograph photocopied at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1988; transcribed and hyperlinked by George Somsel and Paterson Brown - Ecumenical Coptic Project" (defined as "non-profit and non-sectarian, publishing on the Internet the necessary resources for a thorough study of the three Nag Hammadi Gospels")
   
2. CRUM W.E., A Coptic Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1939
   Online Coptic-English/English-Coptic dictionary, can be consulted online by page number and head letter.
   
3. ATIYA A.S., The Coptic Encyclopedia, Macmillan, New York 1991
   Coptic Encyclopedia digitized by Claremont Colleges Digital Library; an indispensable tool for Coptologic research.

   
4. Journal of Coptic Studies
   The Journal of Coptic Studies publishes articles on Coptology in its broadest sense: language, literature, history, art and archaeology. Indexes with abstracts can be accessed online; it is necessary to pay a fee in order to read the articles.

   
5. Coptic Church Review
   The complete series of Coptic Church Review with specialist articles on coptology in a broad sense.
   
6. Goussen Library Collection
   Digitalization of editions of texts from the Goussen Collection, on the Eastern churches, edited by the University of Bonn. It contains several texts on Coptic and the Coptic church published between the 17th and 19th centuries (chronological limit is the year 1900).
   
7. COONEY J.D., Late Egyptian and Coptic art, an introduction to the collections in the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn 1943
   Catalog of the collection of Egyptian art from the Late Period and the Coptic Age.

   
8. Pagan and Christian Egypt; Egyptian art from the first to the tenth century A.D, Brooklyn Museum Press, Brooklyn 1941.
   Catalog of an exhibition of Coptic art held in Brooklyn in 1941.

   
9. DELATTRE A., Nouveaux textes coptes d'Antinoé, in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Congress of Papyrology, Ann Arbor 2007, American Studies in Papyrology, Ann Arbor 2010, pp. 171–174.
   Short paper published in the Proceedings of the 25th International Congress of Papyrology, 2007.
   
10. Kritische Edition der sahidischen Version des Johannesevangeliums
    Worthy project, funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund, on the first critical edition of the Gospel of John in the Sahidic dialect. The authors (Hans Förster, Kerstin Sänger-Böhm, Matthias H.O. Schulz) made use of as many as 172 manuscripts in this important addition to the Coptic literature, freshly printed and open access.
    

Fonts

1. Antinoou: A standard font for Coptic
   Antinoou is a multi-platform Coptic font which supports the full set of Coptic characters encoded in the UCS, with pre-composed combinations of glyphs and overlines, dots, and accents to ensure better printing.
   
2. Coptic Orthodox Church Network
   Site of the Coptic Church of St Mark, Jersey City, New Jersey, therefore besides fonts the site also offers generic links of interest to the Coptic Church.
   
3. Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts
   By George Douros, professor at the Technological Education Institute of Larissa
   
4. St. Takla
   Many, paleographically varied, fonts.
   
5. Moheb's Coptic Page
   A personal page devoted mainly to Unicode fonts for Coptic, but also offering some modules for Bible software (e-Sword), with Coptic texts in English and Arabic transcription. There are also links to many sacred and liturgical texts (older editions) and a section devoted to Optical Character Recognition for Coptic (conversion of scans of Coptic texts into text files)

   
6. Coptic font by IFAO
   Free downloadable Coptic font complete with all diacritics, in use at the editions of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale in Cairo
   

Museums and collections

1. BerlPap - Berliner Papyrusdatenbank
   Online catalog of the papyri from the Berlin Museums. There are 155 Greco-Demotic papyri, 2 Greco-Ancient-Coptic papyri and 7 Greco-Coptic papyri.
   
2. Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant & Hymnody - The Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress
   The U.S. Library of Congress has a section of its website entirely devoted to the Rageb Muftah Collection, created by the foremost expert on Coptic musicology, who died in 2001. The website offers a great deal of important material, including a collection of historical transcriptions of musical texts, recordings, maps, photographs, essays, bibliography, videos and original documents.

   
3. Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, Le Caire - Papyrus et parchemins coptes (P.IFAO copte)
   Catalog of IFAO's Coptic collection, with bibliographical indications of published texts.

   
4. ARTStor: Dura-Europos Documents (Yale University)
   ARTstor Digital Library in collaboration with Yale University has digitalized more than 300 images from the university's papyrological collection. The Dura-Europos papyri were discovered in 1930 and include texts written in Greek, Latin, Demotic, Coptic and Arabic. A subscription is required.
   
5. Papyrus und Ostraka Projekt: Halle, Jena, Leipzig
   The joint project between the Universities of Halle, Jena and Leipzig has enabled the cataloging, digitization and online publication of the papyrological collections (papyri and ostraca) of the three universities. There are detailed entries and images of texts in Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic, as well as in Greek, Latin and Arabic.
   
6. DVCTVS - [Spanish] National Papyrological Funds
   Portal dedicated to the cataloguing and online publication of papyri from Spanish collections. The site is being continuously updated and at the moment only parts of the following collections have been digitalized: Montserrat Abbey, Palau-Ribes and Pastor Foundation. Through the search it is possible to retrieve documents in Coptic (search option for individual dialects), Demotic, Hieratic and Hieroglyphic, as well as many other languages (Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac).

   
7. Papyrus de la Bibliothèque de Genève
   Papyri from the Library of Geneva. An online catalog with a simple but effective search engine that allows users to browse the collection, see enlarged images, and read papyrus catalog cards. There are Coptic and Demotic documents, as well as Greek, Latin and Arabic. The search also allows the display of Demotic-Greek and Greek-Coptic bilingual documents.

   
8. CRUM W.E., Catalogue of the Coptic manuscripts in the British Museum, British Museum, London 1905
   Catalog of the Coptic manuscripts in the British Museum divided by dialects (Saʿidic, Akhmimic, Middle Egyptian, and Bohairic) and by genre, with a brief summary of contents and technical data.
   
9. Papyrus Portal
   A database that allows searching all digitalized papyrological collections in Germany in a uniform and standardized manner. The collections included are those of Berlin, Bonn, Bremen, Erlangen, Giessen, Halle, Heidelberg, Jena, Cologne, Leipzig, Trier, and Würzburg. Papyri can be searched by language, including Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic.
   

Collections of texts and digital libraries

1. CMCL - Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari
   Corpus of Coptic Literary Manuscripts. The project, sponsored by the Unione Accademica Nazionale, La Sapienza University of Rome and the Istituto Patristico "Augustinianum" is directed by Prof. Tito Orlandi, assisted by a board of renowned scholars (Edda Bresciani, Stephen Emmel, Bentley Layton, Francesco S. Pericoli Ridolfini, Manlio Simonetti)
   
2. Brussels Coptic Database (BCD)
   Data bank containing Coptic documentary texts which is edited by the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Centre de Papyrologie et d'Epigraphie grecque (directed by Alain Delattre) and contains 100,000 entries. Information is registered in the following fields: abbreviation, inventory number, support material, provenance, date, dialect, content, bibliography, notes etc.
   
3. Trismegistos Magic
   TM-Magic is the first thematic database hosted by Trismegistos and tries to fill a gap between projects such as the LDAB, HGV and BCD by collecting metadata of somewhat "dubious" nature: all things "religion", "ritual", "magic" and "divination" / "mantike". Trismegistos is an interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources dealing with Egypt and the Nile valley between roughly 800 BC and AD 800.
   
4. Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB)
   This database storing metadata contains at the moment 15,543 Greek, Latin, Coptic and Demotic literary texts. The project is part of the portal Trismegistos which deals with texts in different writing systems from Egypt between 800 BC and 800 AD.
   
5. Trismegistos
   An interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources dealing with Egypt and the Nile valley between roughly 800 BC and AD 800. There are very rich databases of metadata on papyrus and parchment.
   
6. Goussen Library Collection – Universität Bonn
   The well-furnished library of Heinrich Goussen (1863-1927), specialised in the history of Eastern Churches, has been put online by the University of Bonn. It contains as many as 81 volumes in the Coptic section.
   
7. MUNIER H., Manuscrits coptes, Cairo 1916
   A part of the series of the General Catalogue of the Cairo Museum, downloadable in PDF from the Ancient World Digital Library of the New York University.
   

People

1. Tito Orlandi - Centro Interdipartimentale di Servizi per l'Automazione nelle Discipline Umanistiche (CISADU)
   Personal page of Prof. Orlandi, one of the best known Coptic scholars as well as a real pioneer in the use of computers in the Humanities and of the electronic publication of critical editions of manuscripts. There are many downloadable documents in .pdf format, both about Egyptian Coptic and about Computers in Humanities. In Italian.
   
2. Alin Suciu - Personal blog
   Personal blog of Alin Suciu, PhD, Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses, Université Laval, Québec and visiting scholar, Department of Biblical Studies, Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. The blog collects a huge amount of information with ongoing updates on Patristics,. Apocrypha, Coptic Literature and manuscripts.
   
3. April Deconick - Personal blog
   The Forbidden Gospel: personal blog of Prof. April Deconick, Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University. It discusses the Naga Hammadi codices, the Tchacos Codex and other Christian apocrypha.

   
4. Gerard P. Luttikhuizen
   Page devoted to Prof. Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, professor emeritus, Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid en Godsdienstwetenschap, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. There are links to many of his articles in PDF.
   
5. Roberta Mazza. Faces & Voices: People, Artefacts, Ancient History
   Blog of the Italian papyrologist Roberta Mazza (University of Manchester) which is not strictly philological; it mainly focuses on ethical questions concerning papyrology. It contains papers and inquiries of great depth on the antiques market and its many transgressions.
   

Bibliography

1. Coptic Bibliographies
   This site hosts the essential bibliography on the different areas of Coptic studies (first millennium AC, language, dialects, art and archaeology, funerary stelae), based on the courses at the Macquarie University in Sydney.