Simaykah – Coptic Wiki

Coptological Studies

COPTOLOGICAL STUDIES Coptological studies may be divided into several periods. The oldest began in the first Christian centuries, when the Greek alphabet with the additional letters from demotic was used to elevate the spoken Egyptian language into a written language. This made it possible for many Egyptians to read the Old and New Testaments or […]

Coptic Museum

COPTIC MUSEUM A museum founded in Cairo in 1902. The first exhibition of Coptic art in Egypt took place sometime at the end of the nineteenth century in the Bulaq Museum, the precursor of the actual Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. The collection was exhibited in a hall called “La Salle copte” before it was moved […]

Church Of Abu Sayfayn (Old Cairo)

CHURCH OF ABU SAYFAYN (Old Cairo) In the Arabic manuscripts this church is called “church of Abu Marqurah,” and in a Garshuni manuscript (Arabic written in Syriac characters) “church of Mar Quryus” (Mercurius). Two late Coptic manuscripts describe it thus: “Mercurius at the tetrapylon of the river.” Western travelers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries […]

Ecclesiastical Canons

ECCLESIASTICAL CANONS The name given by P. de Lagarde (1883, p. 239, n. a) to distinguish these canons from the seventy-one APOSTOLIC CANONS. In the Arabic version of the Coptic, it is the first book of the 127 Canons of the Apostles. Their superscription in Sahidic is: “These are the canons of our holy fathers […]

Apostolic Canons

APOSTOLIC CANONS A series of eighty-four or eighty-five canons that in Greek form the concluding chapter (47) of Book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions (Funk, 1905, Vol. 1, pp. 564-94). The Sahidic Coptic version counts seventy-one canons, the Arabic series (Book 2 of the 127 Canons of the Apostles) fifty-six only, the same as the […]

Canon Law

CANON LAW Codified law governing a church. The Coptic church has no codex juris canonici, as the Roman church does, but it has remained closer to its sources, which it has grouped in chronological or systematic collections. From the Coptic period, the church of Egypt was concerned with Coptic translation of the sources of church […]

Architectural Elements Of Churches -Index

ARCHITECTURAL ELEMENTS OF CHURCHES -INDEX Aisle Ambulatory Apse Atrium Baptistery Cancelli Ceiling Choir Ciborium Coffer Colonnade Column Crypt Daraj al-haykal Diaconicon Dome Elements Gallery Horseshoe arch Iconostasis Khurus Maqsurah Naos Narthex Nave Niche Pastophorium Pillare Porche Presbytery Prothyrone Prothesise Return aisle Roofe Sacristy Saddleback roof Sanctuary Shaq al-haykal Sacristye Sanctuarye Synthronone Tetraconche Tribelone Triconche Triumphal […]

Narthex – Architectural Elements Of Churches

Narthex A narthex is a vestibule of a church, corresponding to the pronaos (porch) of a classical temple. The Greek word means literally “a reedlike plant.” In the sixth century, Procopius of Caesarea, evidently for the first time, described the antechamber of a church as a narthex because it was small (Procopius De aedificiis 1.4.7, […]

Constantine (Bishop Of Asyut)

CONSTANTINE A sixth-seventh-century bishop of Asyut. History A summary of Constantine’s life has come down complete in a unique manuscript of the Sahidic recension of the Arabic SYNAXARION of the Copts, deposited at Luxor. There also exists for the first part and identical with the above document an isolated leaf (National Library, Paris, Arabic 4895). […]

Butrus Ibn Al-Khabbaz

BUTRUS IBN AL-KHABBAZ A thirteenth-century metropolitan of Ethiopia and copyist of biblical texts. This priest is known from notes found in four Arabic manuscripts of Coptic origin. A fourteenth-century manuscript in the Coptic Patriarchate in Cairo (Theology 220) contains ten monastic texts (Graf, 1934), or seventeen according to Simaykah and Yassa ‘Abd al-Masih (1942), which […]