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The Coptic language of Hellenistic era Egypt in the first millennium C.E. is a treasure trove of information for History, Religious Studies, Classics, Linguistics and many other Humanities disciplines. Despite the existence of large amounts of text in the language, comparatively few digital resources have been available, and almost no tools for Natural Language Processing. This paper presents an endto-end, freely available open source tool chain starting with Unicode plain text or XML transcriptions of Coptic manuscript data, which adds fully automatic word and morpheme segmentation, normalization, language of origin recognition, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, and dependency parsing at the click of a button. We evaluate each component of the pipeline, which is accessible as a Web interface and machine readable API online.

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A famous instruction about children in monasteries reads: "Do not bring young boys here. Four churches in Scetis are deserted because of boys." Taken from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, this apophthegm exposes the presence of homoeroticism and anxieties about the homoerotic, especially erotic encounters with children, in early Christian ascetic communities. This essay examines the construction of male sexuality in early Egyptian monasticism, focusing on the Sayings and the rules of the monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe It argues that the masculine ascetic ideal builds upon certain classical ideals of masculinity, especially the control of the passions, but purports to eschew classical models of eroticism in which the adolescent male represents the ideal sexual partner. However, these sources are designed to be recited or retold as edifying texts; despite their overt disavowal of sexual contact between men and boys, their retelling and rereading keeps homoeroticism and the representation of boys as sexually desirable objects alive in the ascetic imagination.

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Coptic texts and linguistics. The purpose of this project was to research and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and linguistic data objects in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM to facilitate their citation and reuse. We began the project with a preferred solution, the Canonical Text Services URN model, which we validated for suitability for the corpus and compared it to other approaches, including HTTP URLs and Handles. The process of applying the CTS model to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM required an in-depth analysis that took into account the domain-specific scholarly research and citation practices, the structure of the textual data, and the data management workflow.