Me, the Superlinear Stroke and Reading a Coptic Page

Early Coptic manuscripts are written in continuous script, letter after letter with little or no space between words and minimal punctuation, in a broad upright uncial hand. A modern reader finds this disorienting, and a Coptic reader managed it with the help of a small set of marks that the scribes supplied. The most important is the superlinear stroke. Coptic allows certain consonants, me and ne chief among them, to carry a syllable on their own, and the stroke tells the reader that the letter beneath it is doing that rather than waiting for a vowel. Drawn over a run of letters it can also group them.

A second mark, the same stroke used differently, signals a contracted sacred name of the kind Coptic inherited from Greek Christian books. A third, two dots above a vowel, tells the reader that the vowel begins its own syllable. None of these is decorative and all of them are as much a part of the writing system as the letters. Practice varied between dialects, between periods and between scriptoria, and editors of Coptic texts record it carefully because it is evidence. It also means that transcribing a Coptic manuscript into a modern printed edition involves decisions that a photograph of the page does not force, which is why serious work on a Coptic text still goes back to the manuscript.