Delta in Coptic Book Production

Coptic is one of the earliest literatures to be transmitted overwhelmingly in the codex rather than the roll, and the mechanics of the codex left their mark on how letters like delta were used. A codex is built from gatherings of folded sheets, and each gathering has to be identified so that a binder can assemble the book in order. Coptic scribes numbered those gatherings with alphabetic figures, which means the alphabet did structural work in a Coptic book quite apart from writing words, and delta stands at the head of every fourth gathering in a great many surviving manuscripts. The same practice numbered pages, chapters and the divisions of the Psalter.

The Nag Hammadi library, thirteen Coptic codices of the fourth century recovered in Upper Egypt, is among the most closely studied bodies of early book making anywhere, precisely because the covers, the quire structure and the scribal hands survive together. Delta also has a life in Coptic epigraphy. Funerary stelae, wall inscriptions in monastic settlements and the painted texts accompanying figures in church decoration all use the alphabet, and there the letters are cut or painted rather than written with a reed, so the shapes are broader and squarer than the same letters in a book. Reading a Coptic inscription and a Coptic manuscript side by side is the quickest way to see that a letter is a family of shapes rather than a single one.