Coptic tradition holds, and a number of scholars have argued, that Coptic chant preserves genuine musical elements descended from ancient Egyptian religious and secular music, transmitted across many centuries through the early Christian church in Egypt even as the ancient Egyptian religion itself died out and its written musical notation, if it existed in any form comparable to later systems, was lost. This claim of direct musical continuity across such an enormous span of time is treated as a debated rather than settled question among musicologists, since no ancient Egyptian musical notation of sufficient detail survives to compare directly against the chant as sung today, and separating a possible authentic ancient substrate from many centuries of subsequent Christian liturgical development, including plausible influence from Greek, Coptic monastic and later regional musical practice, is a genuinely difficult task with the surviving evidence.
What is much better documented is Coptic chant's role as a marker of continuity and identity for the Coptic Church through many centuries during which Egypt's Christian community became a minority within an overwhelmingly Muslim society following the Arab conquest of the seventh century, the chant tradition surviving as a living, actively used liturgical practice that many within the church specifically understand as connecting them to their ancient Egyptian Christian, and in the community's own telling, more ancient, heritage.