Egyptians who profess Christianity.
The Copts live chiefly in the cities of the Arab Republic of Egypt (such as Asyut, Akhmim, and Cairo); there are also small communities of Copts in the Sudan, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait. Population, more than 2 million (mid-1960’s, esti-mate). The Copts speak Arabic (the Coptic language, widely spoken in the past, has been preserved only as a liturgical language). The majority of the Copts belong to the Monophysite Coptic Church, which was widespread in Egypt from the fifth century to the Arab conquest (639–642). The Muslim conquerors achieved the Islamization of the local population through various administrative and economic measures—lands owned by monasteries were given to mosques and non-Muslims were subject to higher taxes (on land, for example). As a result, Christianity survived only among some of the town dwellers who were free from land taxes.
Coptic Christianity acquired certain Islamic traits: the Copts pray facing the East, they take off their shoes at the entrance to a church but do not remove their head coverings, and so forth. The Coptic Church has its own churches, monasteries, and schools and is headed by a patriarch. The Copts have their own special calendar, which begins with Aug. 29, 284. The Copts (traditionally) work as servants, artisans, merchants, and laborers; a small number are peasants.
G. A. SHPAZHNIKOV
From the fourth to the seventh centuries, before the Arab conquest, the Copts created a distinctive art, which had absorbed the cultural heritage of ancient Egypt and antiquity. Architecture is represented by basilicas (at the White, Red, and Bawit monasteries), domed sepulchres (in al-Bagalat), and two- to four-story dwellings. Imitative art is represented by stone and wood reliefs, paintings, miniatures, and wax painting on boards; decorative and applied art is represented by wood and bone carving and highly artistic fabrics. The realistic images of fourthand early fifth-century Coptic art, which were genre works or were borrowed from Hellenic mythology, were replaced in the fifth and sixth centuries by conventional pictures on Christian subjects; motifs of Near Eastern art (including lion hunting scenes) became widespread in the late sixth and early seventh centuries.
R. D. SHURINOVA