Coptic Palaeography

The Coptic alphabet developed out of a history of attempts to write the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet, beginning soon after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt toward the end of the fourth century BCE. Various selections of characters from the Demotic writing system (which was the last of the native Egyptian writing systems, after the Hieroglyphic and Hieratic systems) were used in addition to the Greek character set in order to represent Egyptian phonemes that were not represented there, and eight of these Demotic characters eventually became a standard part of the Coptic writing system, graphically conformed to the Greek alphabet as written in literary manuscripts around the turn of the third century CE