Coptic Liturgical Prayers in the British Museum

Among the thousands of ostraca stored in the British Museum, there are a handful bearing Christian liturgical prayers in Sahidic, mostly from the Western Theban area and its wider surroundings. These include prayers for the Eucharist, for the evening prayer, and for the rites of monastic initiation. Most of them were published by W. E. Crum and F. E. Brightman in 1901 (O.Crum) and H.R. Hall in 1905 (O.Brit.Mus.Copt. I). However, these editions did not include a commentary or even a translation, and they often fail to recognize the nature of the prayer. In the course of my current project, which aims at preparing a corpus of liturgical prayers on papyrus, including those from the British Museum, I have been able to identify most of them with prayers in medieval and modern printed liturgical books. I have furthermore located parallels in the Syriac and Ethiopic rite, I have found different redactions of the same prayers on papyri from elsewhere, and I have discovered disjoined parts of two of the items in other collections. In the present paper I will present the preliminary results of my study. I will also offer a detailed presentation of one item, BM EA 5892+14241 (O.Brit.Mus.Copt. I p. 23, pl. 17,2), a prayer for the vesting of the monk, which I have been able to join with a recently excavated piece, O.Bachit 929. Moreover, the detailed study of the text revealed that the prayer is identical with a Bohairic prayer from the medieval service of the vesting of the monk with the schema. With this new reconstruction the ostracon becomes a witness to the monastic initiation ritual in Western Thebes, and to the Lower Egyptian, likely Alexandrian, influence on this rite.