New Writing. As native Egyptian scripts slowly died out, the Egyptians still needed, occasionally, to have some way of putting their own language into writing. Many Egyptians had learned Greek and understood the advantages of the simple alphabetic script the Greeks used. There are examples of Egyptian words written in Greek letters from soon after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt (332 B.C.E.). This trend only accelerated in the Roman period as Egyptian scripts fell out of use. One early use of "Old Coptic"—a name given to the first systematic attempts to write extended Egyptian texts in Greek letters—was to make interlinear notations in Demotic magical texts, especially over magical names. Greek spellings, unlike Demotic orthography, included vowels, which helped ensure that the magician could pronounce the word properly and so be more likely to obtain the desired...