Call last night's a throwaway essay, but I do want to look at Pseudo-Athanasius in Arabic. I want to start with some understanding of the installation of Arabic in Egypt.
The Egyptian Muslim historian al-Kindi, because he was of Kinda or at least a mawla thereof, accordingly wrote in classical Arabic. He told about the earliest occupation: that the "Bashmur" rebelled several times. This was the marshy, reedy part of the Delta - think, the Nilotic Zanj. Arabs didn't live here.
Athanasius of Qus tells of a Delta Coptic dialect, that it was dead by his (14th) century. By this he distinguished it from Bohairic, which he would have known well; Sahidic was more an upstream thing. Although, from what I've seen of all recorded Coptics, they were mutually intelligible as written, like an educated modern Portuguese should be able to read Alfonso's Castilian. I'm calling that 13th-C Bashmur "Coptic" was a creole and irrelevant to our eight/ninth-century purpose.
The most successful uprising seems to be the Miaphysite move against Marwan II in AD 749, which detached the Delta from his Harranian régime. The 'Abbâsid historians, who got to write the histories when they took Syria, say the new caliph al-Saffah reached a deal with the rebels: tax-amnesty for two years if you allow Arab garrisons to stay, meaning Fustat "old Cairo".
This smells about right to me. In context many Arabs in Egypt were Umayyad loyalists. Either way, they still wanted their pay. If they weren't being paid locally they had to beg their stipends from al-Saffah. Change allegiance or be hanged as a bandit. Easy choice!
As for the rebels, the choice was similar for them. I mean, they could (in theory) have called in the Greeks, Constantine V being fairly good at his job as the emperors went. But, even besides that he was a dyothelete, he was also an iconoclast.
The Bashmur rose again AD 767 and, this time, had Arab settler support. I don't find where Fustat quite put this one down. In fact Alexandria herself exited the caliphate, I'd say during the fitna between those brothers al-Amin and al-Ma'mun. Around AD 830, Ma'mun sent his general al-Afshîn at least to get Alexandria back, but the Bashmur could not be so taken... until it was. That marked the end of Christendom in Egypt.
Add to this that our copyist Thomas, writing during the Plague, was a Mahalli - a Delta man. I think the Arabic translations of Pseudo-Athanasius will date around to AD 830 when Alexandria was multiethnic, Christian, and anti-'Abbasid. But still not prepared to be speaking Greek again.
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