Coptic Nayrouz, 1726

September 11 will always be a memorable date for Americans, especially those of us who work in New York or Washington and were here that day, but today is also a more pleasant commemoration: it's the Coptic New Year. Since almost everybody else will probably be writing about 9/11, I'll write about Nayrouz.

Nayrouz is usually thought to be derived from Persian Nowruz, which we discussed at some length last spring, but why a Persian word got applied, with different vowels, to a Coptic feast is a little less clear, though most accounts are more are less like the one in Wikipedia, which sees the Coptic name Ni-Yarouou, the Feast of the Rivers (coming as it does just after the flood) as being conflated by early Arab conquerors with Persian Nowruz. Why the Copts themselves would have adopted this corruption is unclear to me.

The Coptic calendar is rather unusual among Christian calendar systems because it does not date from the birth of Christ but from the martyrdoms under the reign of Diocletian, in 284 AD. That was a particular time of trial for the Egyptian church, and is commemorated as the Year of the Martyrs. Also it does not begin in either the spring or in January, but in September. In that it preserves the tradition of the Ancient Egyptian calendar.

So today marks the New Year, the first day of the month of Thout in the Year of the Martyrs 1726, for the Copts of Egypt and the world.