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Abstract
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Roman persecution to Copts started as early as the first century. Even after Christianity had become official religion in Egypt, as they refused to espouse the Emperor's sect.
Another critical relation was arising in Eastern and Western Deserts between the monks and the Bedouins, who started to regularly attack them.
For four centuries following the Arab conquest, Moslem rulers retained relatively peaceful relations with the Copts, but at the beginning of the second millennium, Copts started to live in some expectation of hostility, which periodically flared into violence.
Therefore Coptic architects developed peculiar religious architecture with exceptional defensive arrangements and this research is an attempt to overview those peculiar arrangements inside churches as well as in monasteries. It concluded that -unlike any other religious architecture- safekeeping was a determining factor in Coptic buildings' design and that the development and the distribution of these arrangements had followed certain patterns and characteristics. |