Coptic Palimpsests: When, Where, and Why?

Among the various forms of prolonging the life of Coptic manuscripts –or, better, the life of their writing supports (parchment, but also papyrus, pottery, and wood) – is the practice of scraping them or washing them off to host new text(s) and thus create a new manuscript, in a process that could theoretically never end. On the basis of an earlier and more systematic study of Coptic palimpsests (especially those from the White Monastery of Atripe), some brief further considerations are formulated here in order to highlight, by means of three specific cases, noteworthy phenomena of the reuse methods by which the life of a Coptic literary manuscript can be regenerated. This article also hypothesises that the practice of palimpsesting had more than economic rationales, and was also motivated by the forma mentis of Roman and late antique culture