a. Egypt before the Copts

The word "Copts" is derived from an Arabic word meaning Egypt.

Later on its meaning changed to: Christians in Egypt.

Before we deal with the history of the Copts we will treat the history of Egypt of that time.

We start a little bit earlier.

In 332 BC Alexander de Great conquered Egypt and founded Alexandria. After his death his fighting generals divided his empire; Ptolemy I got Egypt. Just like Alexander he came from Macedonia, and nor he nor his successors (all called Ptolemy) adapted to Egypt. The court spoke Greek!

His successors often married their sisters (often called Cleopatra), to keep business in the family.

Ptolemy III founded the library of Alexandria and the Museion, a kind of University. Alexandria then became not only the most important harbour of the Middle-East, it became famous for his arts and science as well.

Its library was beyond comparison. It should have contained half a million books, in a time they had to be written by hand!

Eratosthenes, scientist and librarian calculated the circumference of the earth, 1800 years before Columbus! And without Euclid mathematics would not be the same.

In 51 BC Ptolemy XIV married his sister Cleopatra VII, but they soon quarreled. In 48 BC the Roman general Julius Caesar came to mediate, took Cleopatra as his mistress, and appointed her as a queen. Her brother/husband drowned in de Nile. Cleopatra was the only one of the Ptolemy family who spoke Egyptian!

When Julius Caesar was murdered she became first Mark Antony's mistress an later his wife. In 31 BC they were beaten by Octavian (afterwards the emperor Augustus) and committed suicide.

Many books were written and movies made about her life.

Egypt became a Roman province, until 639.

In Roman times Egypt had his scholars too.

Basilides a Gnostic from the second century AD came from Alexandria.

He taught that Jezus was not the son of God and he had not been crucified either.

According to him Simon of Cyrene was crucified.

The Jews in Egypt.

In Alexandria lived many Jews. They had, first from the Ptolemies and later from Caesar and Augustus obtained certain privileges, like a kind of own community council in their part of the city. Soon many of the Jews did not know Hebrew any more. Therefore the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the so-called Septuagint.

Some of these Jews reached the history-books. I mention Philo, who wante to couple the Jewish faith to the Greek philosophy, and Alexander who became a procurator of Judea.

After Augustus there were often tensions between the Jews and the other inhabitants of Alexandria. Sometimes this lead to rwos. By one of them Mark was killed.