Crossword-Solution: KOPTS 5 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 11

But while we are watching the success of Ptolemy’s plans, and the rise of this Greek monarchy at Alexandria, we cannot help being pained with the thought that the Kopts of Upper Egypt are forgotten, and asking whether it would not have been still better to have raised Thebes to the place which it once held, and to have recalled the days of Ramses, instead of trying what might seem the hopeless task of planting Greek arts in Africa.

This custom of marking the body had been forbidden in the Levitical law: it was not known among the Kopts, but must always have been in use among the Lower Egyptians.

Epiphanes, in whose youthful heart were joined the cruelty and cowardice of a tyrant, who had not even shown himself to the army during the danger, was now eager to act the conqueror; and in spite of the promises of safety on which these brave Kopts had laid down their arms, he had them tied to his chariot wheels, and copying the vices of men whose virtues he could not even understand, like Achilles and Alexander, he dragged them living round the city walls, and then ordered them to be put to death.

Before the fall of Thebes the Kopts ruled in the Delta; when the free states of Greece held the first rank in the world, even before the time of Alexander’s conquests, the Greeks of Lower Egypt were masters of their fellow-countrymen; and now that Judæa, under the bravery of the Maccabees, had gained among nations a rank far higher than what its size entitled it to, the Egyptian Jews found that they had in the same way gained weight in Alexandria.

During the reigns of the Ptolemies, the sculpture, the style of building, the religion, the writing, and the language of the Kopts in the Thebaid were nearly the same as when their own kings were reigning in Thebes, with even fewer changes than usually creep in through time.