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Coptic icon of St. Mark Portrait of a Coptic Christian woman by Bertha Müller, circa 1850. The Copts are one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East. Although integrated in the larger Egyptian nation state, the Copts have survived as a distinct religious community forming around 5 to 20 percent of the population.
Coptic Christians lost their majority status in Egypt after the 14th century and the spread of Islam in the entirety of North Africa. Today, Copts form a major ethno-religious group whose origins date back to the Ancient Egyptians. [6] [7] The Coptic Christian population in Egypt is the largest Christian community in the Middle East. [8]
The position of the Copts began to improve early in the 19th century under the stability and tolerance of Muhammad Ali's dynasty. The Coptic community ceased to be regarded by the state as an administrative unit and, by 1855 the Jizya tax was lifted. Shortly thereafter, Christians started to serve in the Egyptian army.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, Nubian Christianity was supplanted by Islam. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the larger body of ethnic Egyptian Christians began to call themselves Coptic Orthodox, to distinguish themselves from the Catholic Copts and from the Eastern Orthodox, who are mostly Greek. [14]
The "Coptic period" is an informal designation for Late Roman Egypt (3rd−4th centuries) and Byzantine Egypt (4th−7th centuries).This era was defined by the religious shifts in Egyptian culture to Coptic Christianity from ancient Egyptian religion, until the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the 7th century.
Most Copts live in the south of Egypt but the largest concentrations of Copts lives in Cairo and Alexandria. [3] The Copts, like the rest of Egyptians, are descended from the pharaonic inhabitants of Egypt. Most ethnic Copts belongs to the Coptic Orthodox Church. Copts number between 10-15 percent of the Egyptian population [4] of 104 million [5]
The vast majority of Egyptian Christians are Copts who belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, an Oriental Orthodox Church. [2] [3] As of 2019, Copts in Egypt make up approximately 10 percent of the nation's population, [4] with an estimated population of 9.5 million (figure cited in the Wall Street Journal, 2017) [5] or 10 million (figure cited in the Associated Press, 2019). [6]
Coptic Egypt: The Christians of the Nile (French: L'Égypte copte, les chrétiens du Nil) is a 2000 illustrated monograph on Copts and Christian Egypt.Written by the Belgian historian of religion Christian Cannuyer, and published in pocket format by Éditions Gallimard as the 395th volume in their 'Découvertes' collection, in collaboration with the Institut du Monde Arabe.