To what extent were Copts involved in art, especially iconography?

The Christian faith penetrated into the life of the Copts, even in their eating, drinking, literature, and arts. The Christian symbols and images that were inscribed on their rings, painted on their walls, doors, cups, glasses, plates, and chairs bear witness to this. For instance, in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, there is a Coptic ivory comb from the fifth century, on which appears Lazarus in the shape of an Egyptian mummy on one side, while Christ bearing a cross instead of a scepter, appears on the other side. Besides that, there is another depiction of the healing of the man born blind. On the other side of the comb, there is a Coptic saint enclosed within a wreath supported by two angels.

Egypt was ruled successively by the Greeks, Romans, the Byzantines … etc., who had their own cultures and arts. These rulers had their own districts inside the great cities of Egypt, where they left monuments, which are now mixed with the indigenous ones. In

addition to this, the surviving Coptic monuments do not represent the true quality of Coptic art, since the most prized and valuable pieces were ruined or lost in the unceasing waves of persecution,¹²³⁰ as the historian Al-Makrizi describes. To this effect, K. Wessel says, “At the height of the medieval period, Arab writers described magnificent paintings, those of the shrine of St. Menas for example, were especially famed, but little survives.”¹²³¹ We can therefore only get a rough idea of what once was found in abundance in the Churches and Monasteries.