Semma and the Hands Coptic Was Written In

Coptic writing has a look of its own, and semma is one of the letters that gives it. The oldest Coptic literary manuscripts are written in a broad, upright, carefully separated uncial hand, letters of even height standing apart from one another with little or no space between words, a style built for reading aloud from a lectern rather than for speed. Alongside it, and far more abundant, is a cursive documentary hand used for letters, contracts, accounts and the thousands of ostraca, potsherds and limestone flakes used as scrap, that survive from monastic settlements in Egypt. The two hands can look almost like different scripts.

Over the medieval centuries the literary hand grew more angular and more decorated, and later liturgical manuscripts carry ornamented initials, coloured headpieces and interlace of a kind shared with the wider Christian book cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Coptic printing began much later and had to settle on typeforms, so the shapes familiar from modern Coptic service books and from alphabet charts in church schools are a standardisation of a much more varied handwritten tradition. Anyone comparing a Nag Hammadi codex of the fourth century with a printed Bohairic liturgy will recognise the letters immediately and see at once that the intervening sixteen centuries left marks on every one of them.