ⲁⲃⲅⲇ
Script · 1st century CE → present
An alphabet of Greek letters expanded with seven Demotic signs for sounds Greek lacked. Its explicit vowels make Coptic the key to how ancient Egyptian actually sounded — and it helped Champollion unlock hieroglyphs.
The script combines 24 letters inherited from the Greek alphabet with seven additional signs drawn from Demotic (šay, fay, khay, hori, janja, qima, ti). The Bohairic tradition counts 32 letters in total, each with a fixed order taught to this day.
Hieroglyphic and Demotic writing recorded mostly consonants. By borrowing an alphabet that writes vowels, Egyptian speakers produced the first fully vocalized record of their own language — which is why every reconstruction of pharaonic pronunciation runs through Coptic.
In 1822 Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphic script by working from Coptic vocabulary: Coptic words preserved the meanings behind the older signs. His Lettre à M. Dacier made the argument public, and Coptic has been a cornerstone of Egyptology ever since.
The Unicode Standard encodes the Coptic block at U+2C80–U+2CFF (expanded in version 4.1), so the script can be typed, searched and archived like any modern script. Every glyph on this platform relies on that encoding.
