ament into the three dialects of the Koptic
language; namely, the Sahidic of Upper Egypt, the Bashmuric of the
Bashmour province of the eastern half of the Delta, and the Koptic
proper of Memphis and the western half of the Delta. To these were
afterwards added the Acts of the council of Nicaea, the lives of the
saints and martyrs, the writings of many of the Christian fathers, the
rituals of the Koptic church, and various treatises on religion.

Other monks were as busy in making copies of the Greek manuscripts
of the Old and New Testament; and, as each copy must have needed the
painful labour of months, and often years, their industry and zeal must
have been great. Most of these manuscripts were on papyrus, or on a
manufactured papyrus which might be called paper, and have long since
been lost; but the three most ancient copies on parchment which are the
pride of the Vatican, the Paris library, and the British Museum, are the
work of the Alexandrian penmen.

Copies of the Bible were also made in Alexandria for sale in western
Europe; and all our oldest manuscripts show their origin by the Egyptian
form of spelling in some of the words. The Beza manuscript at Cambridge,
and the Clermont manuscript at Paris, which have Greek on one side of
the page and Latin on the other, were written in Alexandria. The Latin
is that more ancient version which was in use before the time of Jerome,
and which he corrected, to form what is now called the Latin Vulgate.
This old version was made by changing each Greek word into its
corresponding Latin word, with very little regard to the different
characters of the two languages. It was no doubt made by an Alexandrian
Greek, who had a very slight knowledge of Latin.

Already the papyrus on which books were written was, for the most part,
a manufactured article and might claim the name of paper. In the time of
Pliny in the first century the sheets had been made in the old way; the
slips of the plant laid one across the other had been held together by
their own sticky sap without the help of glue. In the reign of Aurelian,
in the third century, if not earlier, glue had been largely used in the
manufacture; and it is probable that at this time, in the fifth century,
the manufactured article almost deserved the name of paper. But this
manufactured papyrus was much weaker and less lasting than that made
after the old and more simple fashion. No books written upon it remain
to us. At a later pe