_|_ | C O P | N E T Aziz S. Atiya, ed., The Coptic Encyclopedia. 8 vols; New York: Macmillan, 1991. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The newly published Coptic Encyclopedia is an impressive work in many ways and, despite some unevenness, it will become a very useful tool for various disciplines related to Coptic studies in the broadest sense. Any decent library must get it. The editors have asked some of the best specialists in Coptic matters, from many countries, to write about 2800 entries, which they divide into four main categories: early Christian history, biographies of saints and other historical figures, art and architecture, and archaeology. Moreover, they have decided to give various aspects of the Coptic language more than 200 pages (400 columns) in the last volume, under the editorship of the Swiss Coptologist Rodolphe Kasser. Many of the entries are very rich, in both content and bibliography, and appear to represent the status quaestionis. Others are weaker, as is the case in any such collective enterprise, and/or of only tangential relevance to a Coptic encyclopedia. The editors have sought, and rightly so, to include in the work everything related to the history, the religion, and the material culture of Christians in Egypt, mainly from the first centuries when Coptic was spoken, side by side with Greek, but also from the Islamic period, when Christian literature begins to be written in Arabic, and up to contemporary issues, represented rather unevenly by some entries. Here, one would have wished for more details on the situation of the Copts today, but this is obviously a delicate issue, on which the editors might not have felt free to express themselves. Coptologists proper (linguists, such as Kasser, A. Shisha Halevy, or W.P. Funk, and philologists, for instance T. Orlandi and P. Nagel), students of Coptic art (P. du Bourguet, for instance), archaeologists (many entries, very detailed, are written by P. Grossmann on what seems to be most ancient Egyptian churches), scholars of Arabic Christian literature (Khalil Samir, S.J.), specialists of patristics and ecclesiastical history (A. Guillaumont and W. Frend, for instance) have all collaborated on the enterprise, for our benefit. The reader will find in these volumes many valuable details, such as the existence and location of manuscripts. Previously such information could be obtained only through much more intense effort, dispersed as the material is in many obscure publications known only by specialists. Reviewed by: Gedaliahu Guy Stroumsa Annenberg Research Institute 420 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA U.S.A. 19106 gstroumsa@annenres.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _|_ This article is one of many more articles about the Coptic Orthodox | Church, the Christian Apostolic Church of Egypt. These articles can be | obtained electronically from Copt-Net Repository, using anonymous FTP COP|NET from pharos.bu.edu:CN. Please mail inquiries to CN-request@cs.bu.edu. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------