Alpha: The Coptic Letter (Value 1), from Greek Alpha

Alpha is the first letter of the Coptic alphabet and the plainest example of what Coptic is: the Egyptian language written in Greek letters. Egyptian had been written for three thousand years in hieroglyphs and in the cursive hands derived from them, hieratic and then Demotic, all of which recorded consonants and left the reader to supply the vowels. From about the first century of the common era Egyptian speakers began instead to write their language in the Greek alphabet, at first in scattered experiments now grouped under the label Old Coptic, and by the fourth century in a settled orthography that served the church. Alpha came across in that borrowing unchanged in shape, in name and in value. It writes the vowel a, short or long according to context, and in the alphabetic numeral system that Coptic also took from Greek it stands for one. That numeral use is not decorative: Coptic manuscripts number their chapters, their quires and their psalms with letters, so alpha appears at the head of countless pages as a figure rather than as a sound.

The letter also carries a specifically Christian charge that Coptic inherited rather than invented. In the Book of Revelation God and Christ are named the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, and the pairing of the two letters became a compact name for eternity across the Christian east and west alike. Coptic funerary stelae, textiles and church fittings from Egypt carry the two letters together, often flanking a cross, and the fact that they are Greek letters standing in an Egyptian Christian setting is exactly the cultural situation that produced the Coptic script in the first place.