EGYPT & THE CLASSICS CURRICULUM: QUINN (con't.)

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The title of the course put the word “Egyptian” first, partly so that Hope students would know what the heck Coptic was, and partly for marketing reasons – it’s “Egyptian” that is the magic name, after all. I followed this up by posting some two dozen fliers around campus. These likewise fronted the word “Egyptian,” but included a quick summary of what Coptic was: the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in (mostly) Greek letters.

The buzz on campus was satisfyingly loud. At the time, my Latin students told me that “everyone” was talking about the course. Certainly, I received many inquiries by phone, e-mail, & personal visit. Some students were checking to see if it really was a language course; I imagine that half were gratified it was (though warned again that it was not a course in hieroglyphic Egyptian), and half were scared off by that fact. Some complained that they were eager to take the class but that it wouldn’t fit into their schedules; they asked if I would change the time or at least promise to teach the class again during their Hope career (the answer was “no” to both questions).

Come January the class began with 11 enrolled students (plus one whom I allowed to sit in; she did fine work, but eventually, and predictably, had to drop out as the pressure from other courses mounted). Two of our majors were in the group, as well as two first-year students with strong high school Latin backgrounds (and who now are minors), but most had never taken any of our courses. One said that she was taking the course as a way of fulfilling the college language requirement, but the others already had done (or were currently doing) so in other languages. I think it is a fair conclusion that, at least for this one course, Hope’s Classics Section was able to reach students whom we otherwise would not have seen. Moreover, since Coptic was the majority language of Roman Egypt, and because important movements within early Christianity are documented by the language, it fits well into the Classics program at Hope College.

Figuring that everyone in the class truly wanted to learn the language, I set a brisk pace. We completed 25 of the 30 chapters of Thomas Lambdin’s text, An Introduction to Sahidic Coptic (Mercer University Press) in the one semester -- quite a feat, since Lambdin’s “introduction” is essentially a complete picture of the syntax. I’d perhaps recommend slowing the pace down by a chapter or two, as folks seemed to be dragging a bit by the end, but maybe that’s inevitable at the end of the spring semester in any class. Along the way I found time for mini-presentations on various topics: linguistic, historical/cultural, and especially miscellanea related to my own pet passion, American Egyptomania in architecture (e.g., the now-demolished “Tombs” of New York City), in religion (e.g., Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham), and in the combination of the two (e.g., Marcel Breuer’s amazing ancient-modern St. Francis de Sales Church in nearby Muskegon, MI).

Since semester’s end I have received the written responses from the course evaluations. No one aired complaints, although several called for the incorporation of even more material on Egyptian culture and Egyptomania. This accords well with my own sense, even before this experiment, that a general course on Egyptian civilization would receive an enthusiastic response. But, alas, that will have to wait until we hire someone more qualified than I. Perhaps in the meantime I can wriggle out of commitments to other fall courses, and conduct a Freshman Seminar on Egyptomania. Looking back at the Coptic course, I can also offer support to the observation made by Miller & Hadavas in the preceding article: majors in Mathematics seem to have a special affinity/aptitude for the Egyptian language. Miller & Hadavas also report drastic attrition between the first and second semesters of hieroglyphic Egyptian. (Who would have guessed that learning an ancient language – and one with some 700 written characters – would be a challenge?). The preliminary results for Coptic are somewhat better. The college lost two students for the fall, one to a year of mathematical research in Budapest & one who’s pursuing a dream in the fashion industry. Of the remaining 9 students from the spring course, three have signed up for its successor “Coptic Readings,” and five more, on the off-chance they’d be able to fit it into their schedules, asked to be notified later this summer when the class will meet (the originally scheduled days/time had to be scratched).

Will I offer beginning Coptic again? I’m inclined to say “yes,” albeit at relatively lengthy intervals (three or four years) to keep the novelty of the course fresh. Although perhaps a new experiment is called for: what would enrollments be like if I offered the course in the fall semester, in step with the normal sequence of foreign languages? And would that have any negative effects on the enrollments in beginning Greek and Latin?