A COPTIC DICTIONARY COMPILED ‘winit THE HELP OF MANY scHOLARS BY W. E. CRUM M.A, F.B.A., Hon. D.Litt., Hon. Ph.D., Berlin NB: alphabetized primarily Gy consonants and then secondarily by vowels www.metalog.org/files/crum. html English Index p.845 Greek Index p. 879 Arabic Index p. 940 OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESSOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-864404-3 13579108642 Printed in Great Britain onacid-free paper by Bookerafe Led, Midsomer Norton, Somerset Scan by TMHTCON MinexpicToc Sugust 2004.PREFACE REPARATIONS for systematic work with a view to a Coptic dictionary were begun P: me some thirty years ago, but intervening undertakings delayed effective progress for some time, “Meanwhile it was ascertained that the Clarendon Press would be not unwilling to consider, when the time came, a project of publication, But early in rgr4 a definite proposal to publish,’at their expense and with provision of funds for collaboration, photography &c,, came from the Berlin Academy. "This generous offer I owed to Professor Erman, who saw the need of a Coptic dictionary on a scale worthy of that of the hieroglyphic Werterbuch and who issued a statement an the subject! A scheme was drawn up and work begun * and if the outbreak of war had mot put an end to all hopes of carrying through such Projects, the book would have been completed long ere now, Yet it was found possible to retain the help of German collaborators, ag well as of those in the allied countries, and afew years after the end of the war a collection of material had been amassed large enough to justify a renewal of negotiations with the Clarendon Press. ‘These resulted in the arrange- ment whereby the dictionary is now published, In igax the late Professor Spiegelberg produced his Handidrterbuch, which he modestly described as a revision of Peyron’s Lexicon (1835), but which in reality is far more than that, Tis most conspicuous novelty wes the addition, in all cases where inthe author's opinion Justifiable, of the hieroglyphic or demotic etymology of the Coptic form. ‘The absence of this important element from the present work some students may regret; it was only after much hesitation that I decided to omit it, I cannot claim an-independent judgement as to the appositeness of a demotic etymology, while to reproduce these in hieroglyphic type—for a mere transcription satisfies no onc—would greatly have increased casts and yet have added nothing of adequate importance to. what Spiegelberg has already given us? What is here offered represents an entirely new and independent warking over of the total available material. Our word-collecting has all been done directly, from the texts; all those in print have of course been utilized—often after collation with the originals: $0 too all unpublished manuscripts, ostraca and inscriptions, to which access could be obtained. ‘The quantity of material used amounts, at a rough estimate, to some 24o,cc0 slips. It is hoped that these resources give a sufficient basis for a comprehensive view of the language, in all its dialects and in all aspects of its literature: biblical, patristic and mundane. ‘The total of recorded independent words—ignoring the countless derived forms—is 3,308, whereof some 390 are still of unknown meaning, These are mostly dnaf Acyéyeva and some are no doubt misread, If I name here only the principal sources which have become available within recent decades, Some notion will be possible of the extent to which materials have increased, ‘To begin with the largest and, in some ways, the most important of extant collections, there are the fifty-six volumes from the Fayydm, bought in 1911 by Mr. Pierpont Morgan, ‘In the Sitsungsberichte tots, 127. I may per- chaps add that, had I not accepted this proposal, the Academy was to have set about producing 2 Coptic dictionary of its own, * The committee responeible to the Academy sonsisted of Professors Erman, Harnack, Ed, Meyer and Wilh, Schulze. » Much etymological work was done by the late Professor Dévaud, but only tome of it hnd been published in his Etudes d'Etymologie Copte, rg22 and in Recueil 39, when his untimely death occurred in 1929, * The total of slips made far exceéded this, but mitch Was discarded as superfluous,vi PREFACE a body of texts unparalleled for completeness, if not for variety.’ Next in size comes the Paris collection: some twenty-five volumes of fragments, the greater part of which has not yet attained to print. ‘Then there is a considerable number of leaves in the Borgian collec- tion, which Zaega’s Catalogue merely mentions, the Curzon manuscripts (now the property of the British Museum), an interesting series in the Berlin Library and an important and varied collection acquired for the University of Michigan. So far I have named mostly Sa‘idic MSS., emanating in great part from the library of Shenoute's monastery. Turning now to Bohairic, there is the imposing series, brought long since from Nitria to the Vatican, considerable parts of which are not yet in print—con- spicuously the volume of Chrysostom; with its thirty-seven complete homilies—and there is besides a large number of important texts, chiefly liturgical, scattered among all the libraries service books, hymn books and especially lectionaries, whence interesting variants of the reccived biblical texts may be gathered, ‘The lectionaries were exploited by La Croze and, thanks to Dr. Burmester, we shall before long have certain of them available. Last, but by ho means least, among our Bohairic resources come the vocabularies, ‘The fourteenth-century ‘Stala of Abii I-Barakit (transcribed and interpreted by Kircher, but cited here from his MS. and a collation of eleven others) of course surpasses the rest in importance; yet there is plenty worth recording in the lesser glossaries also: many an Arabic translation or Greek equivalent, to throw light upon rare or doubtful words. It is true that these glossaries ‘are the preduct of a late age, owing their existence to the disuse that had by then fallen upon the ancient language; but I have thought it better, here as elsewhere, to include too much, rather than too little, and to record everything from these medieval sources that could be claimed as ultimately Coptic. As regards the lesser dialects, reference must first be made to the great increase in material resulting from the discovery and gradual publication of the Manichaean papyti, acquired by Mr. Chester Beatty and the Berlin Museum. These we have been able to use, thanks to the permission of their owners and to copies of the unpublished portions kindly sent. by Dr. Polotsky and Mr. Allberry, But this advantage has been ours only since reaching the letter mand so many would have been the insertions in the Additions, had we attempted to record all néw words and forms under the previous letters, that it seemed preferable to ignore them almost entirely and to refér students to the indexes of the eventual publications. ‘The at present confused idioms included under the term Middle Egyptian, or, as in this book, Fayydmie, may later cn require special vocabularies, but most of its strange phenomena, so far as yet observed, have found a place here.* Finally there is a large body of non-literary texts, which to the earlier lexicographer were entirely unknown, In Peyron’s day not a single Coptic ‘document’ was available; nothing of the kind was heard of until the first batch of the Jémé papyri began to attract the attention of C. W. Goodwin, E. Revillout and M, Kabis, in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies of last century. To-day conditions are far different; a great deal of material of this class is now in prin teclesiastical and monastic documents, Jegal deeds, correspondence—official, commercial and purely privatc—tax receipts, accounts, lists; besides epigraphic texts: epitaphs, dedicatory inscriptions and the like. Further, magical texts of various kinds: prayers, incantations, curses, charms, whence many a strange, forgotten word may be unearthed. In some of these ' V Hyvernat’s Check List of Coptic MSS. inthe of Eecl., Cant. and Lam, (Gf, W. Schubart & Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1919. + First citation on p. 2675, 1 By the kindness of the Inte Professor Carl ‘Schmidt and Fr. A. Kropp we have had the use ‘of the latter's eopy of the ancient Fayydmic text C. Sehmide, Mpéfur Mates, 1936, p. $48), Quota- tions hence have sometimes been distinguished as ‘Schmidt’; the papyrus has since become the property of the Hamburg Stastsbibliothel,