Three coptic male gravestones at Beni Mazar-Minia

Abstract EN

Deir el- Sanquriya is located 15 kilometers to the west of Beni Mazar, in Bahnasathat is an area famous for its ancient history and monuments.

The remaining buildings of the monastery include the restored ancient church (Ramzi, 1994).

The gravestones constitute one of the most difficult sections of Islamic and Coptic art as they include various inscriptions and decorative elements in different styles of engraving, as well as various types of calligraphies engraved upon them.

The difficulty lies in the different content of these inscriptions on the collection of the gravestones under investigation, as they vary between religious expressions, recorded invocations and poetic lines that must be handled to record these gravestones scientifically (Sirajuddin, 2007).

The ultimate objective of this process is to study the civilization of a certain community in a certain historical period, in this context, the purpose of this research is the artistic and archaeological study of these gravestones, as they are Un published.

This aims at showing the importance of these gravestones according to the analytical descriptive method of them and the raw material they were constructed of.

This is followed by an analytical study of what was written and engraved on them, the decorations and interpretation of their contents.