Coptic Monasteries

Detecting organic additives in ancient mortars is significant to be carried out as far as mineralogical, chemical, and physical investigations. That characterisation allows understanding the technology of those mortars and is important to make appropriate decisions in conservation works. Previous characterisations of organic additives in mortars, including jointing and flooring ones used in the Red Monastery located next to Anba Shenoute monastery, have shown the presence of proteins in flooring mortars specifically. This study aims to confirm the addition of protein-based materials in flooring mortars in Anba Shenoute Monastery which almost dated back to the same period (4th-6th century AD). Samples were taken from different flooring mortars and underwent wet chemical analysis, using Comassie Brilliant blue test. Results confirm the addition of proteinaceous additives, raising the probability of intended use for enhancing properties of flooring mortars.

From the valley of Adige, the massif of Monte Baldo is first rising with steep walls, and only above them the characteristic eastern terrace of Monte Baldo stretches.

In those walls, on the altitude of 773 m, already from the year 1000 on, and certainly in the 12th century, there was a hermitage and in 1530 the first church was built there. In 1898 it was rebuilt, but the biggest reconstruction started in 1975.
The church was demolished and rebuilt to the dimensions, which can be seen nowadays. The church was consecrated in 1978 and in 1988 also the Pope visited the place.

Once the place was hardly reachable. Only a narrow and exposed passage was leading to the buildings.

The Sanctuarium and the Shrine of the Corona is a place of silence and meditation, extended between heaven and earth, hidden in the heart of the Baldo rocks. Medieval documents testify that hermits linked to the Abbey of St Zeno in Verona lived in the Baldo area already around the year 1000 and that at least from the second half of the 13th century there was a monastery with a chapel dedicated to St Mary of Montebaldo. This was only accessible by a dangerous narrow path in the rock. A holy tradition dates the birth of the Shrine of Our Lady of the Corona to 1522, the year when the sculpture venerated hen was miraculously transported through angelic intervention from the island of Rhodes, when the island was invaded by the Muslim army of Suliman II. This date is however contested by the existence, in the recesses of the modern shrine, of a fourteenth century painting of the Our Lady and the Child Jesus. This was the first image venerated in the original chapel, which took its name from it. Between 1434 and 1437 St Mary of Montebaldo passed under the ownership of the Knights of St John, or of the Holy Sepulchre, present in Verona since 1362 as the Commenda di San Vitale e Sepolcro, who remained owners of the Shrine until the dissolving under the Napoleonic provision of 1806. It would seem that the group in stone of the Pietà later venerated as Our Lady of the Corona dates to this period. The statue, that is 70 centimetres high, 56 wide and 25 in depth, is made from local stone and painted. It stands on a pedestal that bears the legend “HOC OPUS FECIT FIERI LODOVICUS D CASTROBARCO D 1432”, traditionally considered proof that the statue was made and given to the Corona in 1432 by Lodovico Castelbarco, of a noble family of Rovereto. During its four centuries of operation, the Commenda radically transformed Our Lady of the Corona, turning it into a real spacious and accessible Shrine thanks to the building of a wooden access bridge in the valley (1458) and the construction of a new church measuring 18 metres by 7 over the old chapel (1490-1521).
The sixteenth century saw the creation of two sets of access steps that can still be seen: a wider one, composed of 556 steps which from the spring of Spiazzi, later called “Spring of Independence” went down to the Bridge “del Tiglio”, and a narrower one, 234 steps, cut from the rock along the original very narrow path that went from the bridge to the church.

In the eighties of the fourth century AD, a young bilingual Roman citizen (of Dubrugia on the coast of the Black Sea) traveled to the East in search of spiritual teachers. Disappointed with the monasticism that he found in Palestine (Bethlehem), he went to Egypt in search of spiritual masters and at the end of his stay there he lived in Abu Makar. Many years later in southern Gaul, he wrote the two great classics of the Western monastic tradition (ex oriente lux!). In his two works, the Institutions and the Conferences of the Fathers, John Cassian described in great detail the path of spiritual progress for those who seek perfection or, one might say, that happiness which consists in the contemplation of divine things. Although it is written as two separate works, the Institutes and Conferences are designed as a single project and form a whole that expresses two stages of the spiritual life. In the preface to Cassian's Conferences he explains the link between the first part, the Institutions, and the second part, the Conferences, like this: In such a way the one who through reading the preceding work has merited for himself the name of Jacob according to the spiritual meaning (after having supplanted the carnal vices), now, through studying the teachings of the Fathers of the desert, will be able to reach the contemplation of the divine purity, will be promoted to be called Israel and will learn what are the duties to be observed also on the summit of perfection. We find here a summary of the whole teaching of Cassian and his key ideas: the spiritual life, seen as a transition from the exterior to the interior; the ultimate goal of "continuous prayer" which is at the same time the contemplation of divine things, the invisible things; the active (or practical) life, a necessary first step to make further progress, symbolized by the figure of Jacob, and the goal of the contemplative life, which is symbolized by the name of Israel. We must add that the place where this this development is realized is "the inner man", terminology clearly inspired by St. Paul. And This is the vision of possible spiritual progress that is developed with precision in the twenty-four conferences that follow. Here I will explain only a few main points. The allegorical interpretation based on an etymology of the two names Jacob and Israel, which is also found in Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the letters of Antony, documents the ample dissemination of the concept of the possibility of spiritual progress in early monasticism. Cassian himself returns to the terminology in his twelfth conference, where expands the interpretation with a chain of other allegorical interpretations. Referring to the text of Gen 32.28, he says: "And everyone who has passed the degree of chastity represented by the " supplanter '' Jacob not only will have the nerve in his side paralyzed, but from the struggles for continence and from laboriously working to replace the vices with virtues, will rise to the glorious title of Israel.

Monepiscopacy definition: a form of church government in which a single governing bishop or leader is appointed in a local church, region, or over an entire denomination. This development was a departure from the earliest church model for governing Christian communities typically having a collegial type of leadership in which a group of men share the responsibility of leading and teaching, as among a group of colleagues.

"The Institutes" of Cassian is considered one of the early Latin monastic literary texts, which played a vital role in presenting the eastern, and more specifically the Egyptian monasticism to the Latin west. This study aimed to explore these texts, where Cassian provided its exemplar as a model to follow in both the newly founded and the already existing western monastic communities in Gaul, and found its way to the Benedictine Rules, which played in its turn, a vital role in defining the western monasticism.

In 1988 I interviewed Pope Shenouda about the role of women in the Coptic Orthodox Church today, and also about «deaconesses» and «consecrated women» (in Arabic «mukarrasât»). In this paper we shall concentrate on the question of deaconesses in the Coptic Orthodox Church today and in the past. In our own day, an informal diaconal service (khidma) for women began to be formally organized from 1981 under Pope Shenouda (1971-2012) with specific activities, vows, training, regulations, and liturgical life. The question of the existence of deaconesses in the Coptic Orthodox Church is complex: as no ancient text, prayer, canon or reference is known to date, one cannot affirm their historical existence in Egypt. At the liturgical level, the young women are received in their functions as mukarrasât, subdeaconesses and deaconesses with a prayer of blessing (a consecration, not an ordination, that is without the laying on of hands) accomplished by the bishop in church.The prayer for this consecration used in 1981 is presented here.

While the author cannot speak for churches of Christ, common among them are unique ways of understanding holy scripture, believed to have been written by apostles and prophets of the Lord before the destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and circulated among the early Christian communities (E.g. A letter called First Clement in about 95 A.D., refers to at least ten New Testament books), then collected as a volume by the self-identified Christian community of the second century A.D. or earlier, e.g. the list of Marcion (140 A.D.).

This innovative study uses one well-documented moment of violence as a starting point for a wide-ranging examination of the ideas and interactions of pagan philosophers, Christian ascetics, and bishops from the fourth to the early seventh century. Edward J. Watts reconstructs a riot that erupted in Alexandria in 486 when a group of students attacked a Christian adolescent who had publicly insulted the students' teachers. Pagan students, Christians affiliated with a local monastery, and the Alexandrian ecclesiastical leaders all cast the incident in a different light, and each group tried with that interpretation to influence subsequent events. Watts, drawing on Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac sources, shows how historical traditions and notions of a shared past shaped the interactions and behavior of these high-profile communities. Connecting oral and written texts to the personal relationships that gave them meaning and to the actions that gave them form, Riot in Alexandria draws new attention to the understudied social and cultural history of the later fifth-century Roman world and at the same time opens a new window on late antique intellectual life.

Most Christians are aware of only one pilgrimage center, the Holy Land in Israel that includes Christian holy places where Jesus Christ lived, was crucified and raised from death, and ascended into heaven.  Few are aware of the Christian pilgrimage center that was located in the Western Desert of Egypt and flourished during the fifth and sixth centuries.  In 1905, Kaufmann expedition discovered this pilgrimage center.  Kaufmann discovered a basilica known as the marble basilica, which was built by the Roman emperor Arcadius, a big church built by Athanasius the patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, other churches, and the remains of a city previously called Abu Mina.  All were built in the desert for Christian pilgrims who were visiting St. Mina’s shrine.

"The multitude of those known only to God" may be saved in a way known only to God. The mercy and compassion of God and desire that all should be saved does not contradict the basic principle that there is no other name under heaven on earth through which comes salvation. Rather they are two principles that have to do with the nature of God and with the revelation of God, but should it not be kept in mind that not all has been revealed to us? Only God knows all! God alone is all great and all knowing, all merciful and philanthropos (a lover of mankind) = an attribute of God is philanthropia.

A reevaluation of the ostraca and graffiti from the First Monastery of Apa Phoibammon "in the Rock" - known in scholarship as the original home of bishop Abraham (who abandoned the site in favor of a new monastery at Deir el-Bahari) but for little else - reveals close ties of Abraham and his apparent predecessors as abbots, the priests Apa Samuel and Apa Pesynte, to the monastic network of Hermonthis, visible in the newly discovered ostraca dossier from the nearby Monastery of Apa Ezekiel, in turn led by Abraham's predecessor as bishop, Andrew of Hermonthis, in the later 6th century.

http://www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org/bibliographymonasticism.htm

This bibliography of academic literature on late antique and early medieval monasticism will be updated about twice a year. Please contact me (adiem@maxwell.syr.edu) if you would like to add titles (including your own work) or make corrections.

First edition of a tenth-eleventh century parchment sheet found during excavations in the Monastery of Naqlun (Dayr al-Malâk, Fayoum). The sheet contains informal copies of two hymns in Fayoumi-Sahidic. The longest of these is an acrostic hymn on the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which reflects the direct influence of the rich Coptic Dormition literature. Both hymns are interesting witnesses to the Sahidic Antiphonary.

El artículo analiza la Vida de Apolinaria / Doroteo (BHG 148) en el contexto de las vidas de santas travestidas de la Antigüedd tardía y los principales tópicos literarios que en ella aparecen. Además, se establece una estrecha conexión con la Vida de Hilaria, conservada únicamente en su versión copta y se postula el origen egipcio de esta Vida de Apolinaria.

The aim of this book is to present the material record of Nubian monasticism in a systematic manner and to conduct a comparative analysis of this phenomenon. This book also addresses several fundamental issues, for instance the presence of various forms of monasticism (hermitages, laurae and coenobitic monasteries) in Nubia and their spatial organisation. The source base for reconstructing the monastic movement in Nubia, or rather life in individual monasteries, is largely archaeological and epigraphic. In order to analyse sources regarding Nubian monasteries, it is necessary to place them in the wider perspective of the Christian monastic movement – a new social phenomenon never before or after repeated in the history of humankind. Looking beyond Nubia is motivated not only by the desire to find reference points in centres that influenced the formation of the Nubian civilisation, but also because such parallels are indispensable for the interpretation of archaeological finds.
One of the fundamental questions posed repeatedly in this book concerns the models that inspired the creators of monastic communities in Nubia. The geographic arguments point primarily to Egypt, but other regions of the Late Antique East should not be ruled out prematurely. We have, for instance, sound evidence for Syrian influence on the culture of Christian Nubia, especially liturgy. Also Constantinople, a core region of the Eastern Mediterranean and the imperial capital, must be considered as a possible source of inspiration.
This book also addresses several fundamental issues, for instance the presence of various forms of monasticism (hermitages, laurae and coenobitic monasteries) in Nubia and their spatial organisation. Thus far, attempts to characterise Nubian monasticism in a synthetic manner have taken the form of short articles (Godlewski 2013; 2015) limited mostly to discussion of architectural features. In addition, with the notable exception of Adam Łajtar’s ad-hoc publications spurred by the emergence of new evidence, no study published to date collects and discusses the various titles associated with the monastic milieu, investigating who stood at the head of coenobitic communities, what their internal organisation was like, and how the monastic, ecclesiastical and spiritual hierarchies were intertwined. Another area in need of investigation is the relationship between Nubian monks and society, including the roles they played in lay communities and whether they really ‘abandoned’ the world at large. The book seeks to determine whether the Nubian elites perceived monastics as a threat to their dominant position in the social hierarchy, or rather collaborated with monks, taking advantage of the fact that monasteries offered human resources with highly esteemed and useful skills that proved helpful, if not indispensable, in managing non-monastic communities ranging from individual settlements to the state.

ABSTRACT: The Valley of the Kings contains many royal and private burials from the New Kingdom, with continuing discoveries of new tombs, caches, huts, walling systems, and other features.  This necropolis is inextricably linked to a broader ritual and secular landscape in West Thebes, from which we have a patchwork of earlier and later occupation, desert routes, other royal tombs, memorial and cult temples, processional routes, palaces and villas, harbor basins and waterways, private cemeteries, and a main town and a workmen’s village serving the production, maintenance, and security of both royal and private tombs.  Remote sensing includes diverse space-, aerial-, and ground-based technologies (e.g., WorldView; ASTER; LiDAR; Thermography; GPR; Electrical Resistivity), which are improving continuously and offer a cost-effective and efficient means of detecting surface, sub-surface, and buried sites, structures, and features in this region.  This remote sensing study has located a huge, sub-surface structure at Qurnet Murai that is suggestive of a Coptic monastic complex, and hut clusters elsewhere.  UPDATE: This penultimate draft copy excludes the latest minor additions, including a brief statement confirming the presence of visible surface/subsurface architecture at Qurnet Murai, which was observed during the authors' brief trip to Deir el-Medineh in late December 2014.  Published in late December 2015 / early January 2016.

In Egypt, the three patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob can be frequently found in liturgical texts from an early date onwards. However, images of this theme are scarce in Coptic art. The two examples preserved are evaluated in this article from an interdisciplinary perspective, including the important matter of architectural context.

Syriac manuscripts feature several systems of numerals, and earlier studies have identified three based on the Syriac alphabet. Marginal notes found in the manuscript London, British Library, Add. 14587 preserve a fourth and previously undescribed alphabetic numeral system. After presenting this system and discussing the evidence that led to its identification, this article argues on palaeographic grounds that the late eighth century forms a terminus post quem for the numerals found in this manuscript. Analyses of a donation note and another manuscript further suggest that the numerals were added by a monk or monks from the Syriac tradition residing in Egypt, associated with either a monastery in Upper Egypt or the Monastery of the Syrians (Dayr al-Suryan) in Wadi al-Naṭrun. In either case, the alphabetic numeral system found in the margins of this manuscript reflects the efforts of Syriac monastic communities in Egypt to curate the Syriac literary heritage and shape the way others encountered it.

Philip Michael Forness, “Curating the Syriac Literary Heritage in Egyptian Monasteries: A Newly Identified Numeral System in Syriac (British Library, Add. 14587),” Journal of Semitic Studies 67, no. 1 (2022): 151–68.

Egyptian monasticism began and spread as a movement of popular piety, but successive generations of theologians
attempted to give it inner theological coherence and consistency. Although we may find some clues in the early monastic terminology and even if we can engage in well-founded speculation, we shall never know what inspired or motivated the many thousands who took up the monastic life in Egypt at the end of the third century and the early fourth century to do so. They did not leave behind any written testimony. Our literary sources such as the Life of Antony and the Lives of Pachomius and his successors come later and they are clearly aimed at creating an ideal of the monastic life, an ideal that owes much, to be sure, to the earlier philosophical and spiritual tradition concerning the possibility of spiritual progress.

"In May 2008, the Coptic Orthodox Centre in Stevenage, UK organized a conference on Coptic Culture: Past, Present, and Future. The conference aimed to highlight the contributions and achievements of one of the most obscure periods of Egyptian history: the Coptic Period. The importance of this period lies in its valuable contributions to some of the most formative theological debates of Christianity.

Strictly defined as a Late Antique culture, spanning only the third to the seventh centuries AD, the heritage of the Coptic Period still survives today in the artistic expression, liturgical services, and heritage of millions of Egyptian Christians who live in Egypt and abroad. This period’s lasting contributions, however, remain underappreciated, and many of its aspects remain unclear, or unknown to the general public.

For the first time, the conference at the Coptic Centre brought together, specialists working on all aspects of Coptic Culture, from its earliest phases to the present day. One of the aims of the conference was to highlight new research on Coptic art, writings, and archaeology. By bringing together specialists, academics, and Coptic clergy, the conference fostered an active discussion of what defined Coptic identity in centuries past, and what it means to be Coptic in contemporary culture, both in Egypt and abroad. It is important that we draw on, understand, and appreciate the rich cultural heritage of this period as we look to our past to inform our present and define our future.

The conference drew scholars from Australia, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Their papers were organized along 5 general thematic blocks that dealt with (1) The Egyptian roots of Coptic culture; (2) How do we know what we know: Archaeological Sites and Museum Collections; (3) Aspects of Early and Medieval Coptic Culture: Case Studies; (4) Current Trends in Coptic Studies; and (5) Coptic Culture Today and where it’s heading. This volume contains their contributions."

Edition of a fragmentary Coptic tombstone that derives from recent excavations of the Institute of Fine Arts/New York University and Princeton in the North Necropolis of Abydos. It belongs to a group of four other stelae of the so-called 'litany type' with a certain provenance from the site, which assures a date for our stela in ca. the sixth-eighth centuries and aids in the reconstruction of some of its missing parts.

" To date the research on the church architecture in Nubia has consistently failed to differentiate, territorially and historically, between two different Nubian kingdoms " (Godlewski 2006b) and one could add the third, Alodian, kingdom to this. The author's involvement in a project to publish the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago excavations at the Qasr el-Wizz monastery has generated this study of the early architectural history of the katholikon at Qasr el-Wizz and its development, analyzed in the context of studies on Nubian Christianity. Due to a rampant misuse of terminology referring to the functional parts of churches in Nubian studies, a review of this vocabulary was deemed essential as a background for a presentation of the late George T. Scanlon's views on the development of this particular church, followed by the present author's addenda et corrigenda, and a discussion and conclusions for the study of Christian Nubian sacral architecture.