ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com © Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material Chapter 1 Linguistic Identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt Sofía Torallas Tovar 1. Introduction In a plurilingual society the use of a precise language is a choice that has a heavy signiicance and a deined position within the sociopolitical situation. Oten the languages spoken in such a frame are used as political weapons. I shall present here an overview of the sociolinguistic situation of Ptolemaic and Graeco-Roman Egypt in the light of the documents that have come down to us, with a special focus on the question of the identity of the speaker and of the conscious choice of language in every real-life situation. It is clearly a daring aim, to try to reconstruct the conscience of a speaker, something that is so far away from written language. From the arrival of Alexander in 332 BCE to the Arab conquest in 641 CE, Egypt was a melting-pot of languages, scripts, cultures, ethnic groups and beliefs. he native population was invaded by a dominant group that brought among its instruments of power a new language that would become the language of administration, power and culture. his created a complex sociolinguistic situation, in which not only languages but also scripts had a role to play. he abundance of public documents from the Ptolemaic period shows that Greek, as the language of administration, had gradually displaced Aramaic and Demotic, which survived, however, for another couple of centuries, albeit more in literary texts. Hand in hand with the birth of the Library of Alexandria and the Museum, Greek also became the language of a developed culture, in the ields of the arts and the sciences. he Egyptian language, on the other hand, acquired a special value and, in contradistinction to the language of the powerful, it came to be related with a very special kind of religiosity. Besides, the Egyptian language, in spite of the adversity, was able to maintain a literary production of some quality in Demotic, which had some general relevance and was even translated into Greek. In this essay I shall survey the complex sociolinguistic situation throughout the Graeco-Roman and late antique periods, in order to evaluate the situation of the various languages and scripts, and more speciically their sphere of action and how they served the purpose of delineating religious identity, both within paganism and within the newly born Egyptian Christianity. Modern studies of language contact have reached conclusions concerning sociolinguistic patterns that can be projected into the past so as to illuminate the way in which ancient linguistic situations developed. It is diicult, however, to compare types of information that are so distant from each other: the written language preserved in