Kappa and the Coptic Reckoning of Time

Because the alphabet is also the numeral system, letters like kappa spend as much of their working life as figures as they do as sounds, and nowhere more than in the Coptic calendar. The Coptic year has twelve months of thirty days with a short thirteenth period of five or six days at the end, an arrangement descended directly from the ancient Egyptian civil calendar and regularised under Roman administration. Its years are counted in the era of the martyrs, which begins with the accession of the emperor Diocletian, whose persecution the Coptic Orthodox Church remembers as the heaviest it suffered. That reckoning is still used in the church, so a Coptic liturgical book prints dates that no other calendar in daily use anywhere shares.

Writing those dates means writing letters as numbers, and a month of thirty days means the twenties are in constant use. Kappa heads them. The same numerals date colophons, the notes scribes wrote at the end of a manuscript recording who copied it, when, and often for whom, which are among the most valuable single lines in any Coptic codex. A colophon fixes a manuscript in time and place, and a scholar reading one is reading the alphabet in its numerical rather than its phonetic function, letter by letter, exactly as the scribe intended.