Ancient Egyptian language

The love poetry of Ramesside Period Thebes presents human love against a backdrop of frequently bucolic and marshy environments, with the trappings of festivals and religious imagery present in some of the poems. Precursors for the corpus appear in the form of festival songs recorded in Eighteenth Dynasty Theban tombs, presenting the festival activities of the gods against a backdrop of mortal love, performed in the setting of banquets involving ritual drunkenness. The Ramesside love poetry may reflect events of a romantic and even or-giastic nature that accompanied certain New Kingdom Theban celebrations. The common festival background for parallel corpora of texts celebrating divine love and human love in Egypt may provide a template for the performance setting of the Song of Songs, and help explain why that text is both so descriptive of the interactions of two human beings, and a text ultimately accepted as part of the Old Testament.

In this paper, we propose a constructional analysis of the meanings of two generic motion verbs in Ancient Greek and Coptic (Sahidic dialect), the verbs baínō and bôk, respectively, both of which are glossed as ‘go’ and are characterized by extensive polysemy. We argue that an adequate analysis of these meanings can only be achieved in a framework that recognizes lexical constructions at the level of the verb sense, showing that each meaning correlates with encoding features (ranging from morpho-syntactic to semantic, discursive, and lexical ones) that are not predictable, or at best are only partially motivated. Through extensive corpus analysis, we identify such significant, frequency-based patterns of correlation, each of which represents a lexical construction. Our data thus argue strongly for an approach to polysemy in which individual meanings are represented as enriched lexical constructions, which include morphological and discursive specifications (in addition to standard valence information).

We assess the state of and potential for expansion of dendroarchaeological research in Egypt. We also report previously unpublished findings, which we hope will assist with the new effort in constructing tree-ring chronologies in Egypt. In doing so, we explain briefly some of the problems and potential of the future enterprise.

This paper represents a new publication, edition, and interpretation of the selfpresentation of Neshor named Psamtikmenkhib (hereafter Neshor) found on theophorous statue Louvre A 90. Neshor and his statue date to Late Saite Egypt, and the text is rich and unique in content. Neshor’s activities at Elephantine, especially his role in the mercenaries’ revolt against King Apries early in the king’s reign are presented in light of Neshor’s related military titles and epithets. Archaeological issues surrounding the statue and text are also discussed.

I want to thank the two HJC reviewers for their valuable and constructive criticism. I am thankful also to my colleagues who generously provided their insightful criticism on earlier drafts: Stephen Quirke (UCL) and Donald Reid (University of Washington). All translations of Arabic and ancient Egyptian texts are mine unless indicated otherwise. I dedicate this article to Ineke Sluiter (Leiden University). She offered me the confidence and support in a moment that transformed the way I approached the normalization of Eurocentric ways of thinking during my PhD studies (2011–2016). It all began with my participation in an international conference organized at UCL in 2014, titled “The Language of Persuasion”. I finished my presentation on how ancient Egyptian and Arabic poetics employ different persuasion strategies based on certain types of literary devices. I received a few interesting questions, but the last question was wrapped in sarcasm and irritation. A renowned professor based at the University of Oxford asked why I did not employ “the more scientific European terms” to describe both ancient Egyptian and Arabic literary cultures. I tried to answer, but my shivering answer fell on deaf ears, until the moment in which Ineke declared her full support to the idea that each culture generates its own literary terms and concepts and we should refrain from imposing Eurocentric terms on non-European cultures. Her support restored my full confidence and gave me a real hope that some European scholars can advocate these voiceless non-European cultures’ rights to be treated with respect and dignity, instead of automatically considering their own terms and concepts as primitive or unscientific. After this conference, I decided to generate a clear path for my post-Eurocentric methodology.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10646175.2021.1879695?src=&journalCode=uhjc20

The paper offers literature review of the three suggested approaches that answer the question of ancient Egyptian meter. These theories reflect the constant contradictions between the dominant European Imperial languages of the 19 century (German - French - English). The paper also investigates the religious motivations that prompt Euro-American scholars to compare ancient Egyptian with Biblical texts. The rediscovered thematic affinities formed the main objective of these studies in order to restore historical hypothesizes that approve the legitimacy of several Biblical thoughts. Moving beyond the theoretical parameters of Eurocentric modernity, this paper argues that medieval Arabic literary criticism can be used as a foundation for understanding the literary nature of ancient Egyptian literary devices in order to recognize the various internal forces of the ancient Egyptian literary reproductions. Premodern Arabic poetics, represented in the theory of balāghah (literally ‘eloquence’ and roughly ‘poetics’), can offer the ideal path to take advantage of the linguistic affinities between the two languages in the realm of literary studies.
This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under ERC-2017-STG Grant Agreement No 759346 and is part of the “Global Literary Theory” project at the University of Birmingham.

Rashwan, Hany. “Against Eurocentrism: Decolonizing Eurocentric literary theory in the Ancient Egyptian and Arabic poetics,” in Howard Journal of Communications, especial issue on Theorizing Beyond the West, edited by Kehbuma Langmia, 32.2, (2021): 171-196.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2021.1879695

The purpose of Professor Kenneth Kitchen’s magisterial Ramesside Inscriptions is simple—to make available the principal historical and biographical texts of the Ramesside age (c.1300–1070 bc) in a comprehensive, compact and accurate edition that should be comprehensive but handy to use. It does not, however, include purely literary, ritual and funerary texts.
Almost all of the texts in this volume come from the very beginning of this new era in Egypt’s history at the beginning of the 13th century bc—either from the reign of Ramesses I, founding father of the Egyptian 19th Dynasty, or that of his dynamic son and successor Sethos I. As Ramesses I reigned only into his second year, and the reign of Sethos I lasted between eleven and fifteen years, virtually everything here dates within a span of only twelve/seventeen years, at most.
Arranged by category, this hieroglyphic edition covers foreign wars and diplomacy (esp. dated), then internal affairs (dated documents, special topics or groups), a geographical series of royal monuments (from north to south), the principal documents of the reign (papryi, ostraca, letters, legal documents, and the like), in addition to further inscriptions pertaining to the royal family. A further twenty-eight categories are devoted to the private monuments of the principal administrators of the Empire, along with the vast store of documentation pertaining to the activities of the royal artisans from the village of Deir el-Medina in western Thebes.
First published in eight individual fascicles between 1969 and 1975 by B. H. Blackwell (Oxford), this volume is here re-printed for the first time in a single, handsome, book.

This article shows that a hitherto unattested construction type – namely, adverbial subordinator prefixes – is in fact attested in several languages. While Dryer’s (2013) 659-language convenience sample does not turn up any clear example of such a construction, we argue that this is in part due to arbitrary coding choices that a priori exclude potential constructions of this type. In order to document the existence of adverbial subordinator prefixes, we present three languages with different genealogical and areal affiliations (Japhug, Cree, and Coptic), each of which shows solid synchronic evidence for what appears to be a universally dispreferred feature. Furthermore, we propose a diachronic account for the paucity of documented adverbial subordinator prefixes, according to which cross-linguistic distributions of structural features make rare the source constructions from which adverbial subordinator prefixes can grammaticalize. However, there are nonetheless grammaticalization pathways, some of which seem to involve rare types of change, which can lead to the development of such prefixes.

In the course of the last ten years, the North Kharga Oasis–Darb Ain Amur Survey team, led by Salima Ikram (American University in Cairo), has been exploring a network of interconnected desert paths in Egypt’s Western Desert, known as Darb Ain Amur. These marked paths run between Kharga Oasis and Dakhla Oasis, linking them to Darb el-Arbain, a notorious caravan route facilitating contacts between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa since prehistoric times. Ancient travelers using the
Darb Ain Amur spent several days in the midst of theWestern Desert and were thus forced to use areas around sandstone rock outcrops as makeshift stopovers or camping sites. During these much-needed
breaks, ancient travelers identified accessible, inscribable surfaces on the towering sandstone massifs and left on them their personalized markings. In this essay, I examine two short rock graffiti carved
by such travelers in a site north of Kharga Oasis, focusing on the types of information one may extract from such ancient epigraphic materials.

The study addresses the dating of Middle Egyptian literary texts from the perspective that has merited the least attention so far, language. General discussions concern aspects of the linguistic situation in early/mid-second millennium BCE Egypt, the nature of the record in which the primary linguistic description is necessarily carried out, processes of textual alteration in the course of transmission, and the configurations of Middle Egyptian in literature. In the case of Middle Egyptian literary texts, the major strategy for dating consists in studying phenomena of written innovation and obsolescence in relevant registers in order to define upper and lower temporal bounds for a composition to be dated. In a complementary approach, not indexed on linguistic change, distinctive linguistic repertoires and phenomena of linguistic re-composition are directly targeted.Implications that spring from the proposed datings are outlined with a view on how these could affect the discussion of the cultural functions and of the historical development of Middle Egyptian literature. Beyond dating, the book is more broadly a study of the language of Middle Egyptian literature, of differences internal to this tradition, and of how it productively relates to other written discourses on linguistic levels as much as on semantic ones.

/Between Heaven and Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt/. Edited by Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer. Oriental Institute Museum Publications 35. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2012. ISBN-13: 978-1-885923-92-9. Pp. 232; 210 illustrations (most in color). 9 x 11.5 inches; Paperback: US $29.95

Issued in conjunction with an exhibit at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, this is the first comprehensive study of birds in ancient Egyptian society, economy, art, and religion. Essays address the role of birds in the religious landscape, their use in hieroglyphic and Coptic scripts, birds as protective symbols, as decorative motifs, and as food. A group of essays on "Egyptian Birds and Modern Science" presents the newest forensic research on bird mummies.
Other articles address bird behavior as shown in Egyptian art and the present state of avifauna in the Nile Valley. The catalog describes forty artifacts, many of which are previously unpublished. An index of bird species makes this volume useful for naturalists as well as for Egyptologists and art historians.

Collections of scenes and texts designated variously as the “Book of the Earth,” “Creation of the Solar Disc,” and “Book of Aker” were inscribed on the walls of royal sarcophagus chambers throughout Egypt’s Ramessid Period (Dynasties 19–20). This material illustrated discrete episodes from the nocturnal voyage of the sun god, which functioned as a model for the resurrection of the deceased king. These earliest “Books of the Earth” employed mostly ad hoc arrangements of scenes, united by shared elements of iconography, an over-arching, bipartite symmetry of composition, and their frequent pairing with representations of the double sky overhead. From the Twenty-First Dynasty and later, selections of programmatic tableaux were adapted for use in private mortuary contexts, often in conjunction with innovative or previously unattested annotations. The present study collects and analyzes all currently known royal and private Book of the Earth material, including previously unpublished scenes and texts from the tombs of Pedamenopet and Padineith at Thebes.

The present article aims to combine an accurate philological analysis of the letter to the dead UC16163 and its archaeological context. The letter is a double document containing two letters addressed by Shepsi to both his dead parents (Iinkhenmut and Iy). In fact, the letter was found in an undisturbed tomb, no. 7695, in the necropolis of Qau, where only a single male deceased lay in the funerary chamber, with no evidence/traces of any further interment or later disturbance. According to the text of the letter, one would expect two internments inside the tomb, Shepsi’s father and mother. The discrepancy between the content of the letter and the archaeological evidence is remarkable. However, the new philological reading here proposed sheds new light on the role of Shepsi’s brother, Sobekhotep, switching his role from the dangerous, as previously interpreted, to simply negligent dead. Sobekhotep is the prime element in both texts and he is the last person to have died in Shepsi’s family, as in many points evident in the two letters. The particular emphasis of the episode of the funeral/burial of Sobekhotep reveals that Shepsi is addressing directly to his brother. The new interpretation of the text seems to support the idea that the deceased found together with the bowl in Qau tomb 7695 is Sobekhotep himself.

In this article, we propose a system for transliterating Coptic, akin to those systems used for transliterating Greek, Russian, or Arabic. It is intended to serve as a standard for linguists interested in making Coptic data more accessible to non-specialists. We also discuss some questions that may arise, and provide several fully transliterated and glossed Coptic examples.

In lexical semantic descriptions of Ancient Egyptian, there is a tendency to search for a single basic meaning or Grundbedeutung, even if the element in question has a wide range of meanings or func- tions. The actual functions of these elements —— as they occur in texts —— are usually explained as contextual or combinatory, derived from the interaction of the basic meaning with environmental cues or triggers. While there are certainly lexical items for which this is appropriate, there are nonetheless other ways of describing polyfunctionality, a generic term for situations in which multiple functions (or meanings or senses) are associated with a single signifier. The goal of the present article is to demonstrate that other kinds of analyses are possible, and can be equally interesting and useful for describing the facts of Ancient Egyptian and for relating them to cross-linguistic research. Moreover we show that Ancient Egyptian linguistic data allow us to test —— corroborate, extend, or revise —— hypotheses that have been proposed in the typological literature. The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 raises the problem of polyfunctionality and possible approaches to this pervasive linguistic phenomenon; Part 2 presents the (classical) semantic map model developed by typologists in order to account for the cross-linguistically recurrent relationships between two or more meanings of single linguistic forms; Part 3 examines the applicability and usefulness of this model in Ancient Egyptian with two small-scale case studies dealing with specific semantic areas ([a] instrument-companion and [b] allative). In each case, the semantic map provides a principled method for the analysis of polyfunctionality in both synchrony and diachrony.

As in other linguistic disciplines, which have a strong philological tradition and predominantly aim at individual language studies, interlinear morphemic glossing (IMG) has, for a long time, not been particularly popular amongst Egyptologists. This might seem a bit surprising if one bears in mind that forerunners of IMG 1 were employed quite regularly in the early days of Egyptian language studies. Devices for making a foreign language text accessible to persons not acquainted with the underlying idiom had been developed centuries before 2 and were extensively used by scholars who dealt with languages that were then considered as belonging to the more exotic ones. The implicit categorization of languages in accordance with their assumed accessibility to the audience is mirrored by a distinct treatment in investigations dealing with multilingual sources: A scholar like Athanasius Kircher (*1602, †1680) felt no urge to support the readers of his Latin tracts with any hints for understanding sections in Greek 3 but usually added translations to passages in Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, German 4 and Italian 5 -and provided transcriptions as well as word-to-word glossings in cases where he used much rarer quotations from texts in Early Semitic letters or in Chinese characters. 6 depicts a copy of what Kircher presented in his OEdipus AEgyptiacus (1652) as an inscription from Sinai with five levels of additional analytic information -a rendering in "normalized" letters, "transliterations" into Hebrew and Syriac, a Latin transcription (of the latter) and a word-to-word translation.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Since 2011, a joint team of the Paris-Sorbonne University and the French Institute in Cairo (IFAO) has been excavating an exceptionally well-preserved harbor complex from the Early Old Kingdom at Wadi al-Jarf along the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea. Considered now to be the oldest port site in Egypt and the first prototype of this kind, it was used for a short time as a departure point to the Sinai Peninsula for royal expeditions on the way to the regions of Serabit al-Khadim and Wadi Maghara, the principal mining areas for copper and turquoise. According to the finds and epigraphy, all these installations date back exclusively to the very beginning of Dynasty 4. In 2013 the site received much scientific attention after the discovery of hundreds of fragments of narrative and administrative papyri, some of them name King Khufu and report various operations linked to the construction site of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Since 2013, the installations along the coastline have been under investigation and revealed all the constitutive elements of a harbor, such as an extensive mole underwater, numerous nautical elements, dwelling and storage buildings with evidence of administrative control and even a large workmen's barracks. The site at Wadi al-Jarf seems to naturally extend on the west coast of the Sinai Peninsula and a clear connection now has to be considered with the so-called late Old Kingdom fortress at Tell Ras Budran identified on the shore of the El-Markha plain. Based on the Wadi al-Jarf discoveries, its short-term occupation and the pottery evidence, which create a direct link between the sites, the function and chronology of the fortress needs to be completely reassessed and be regarded as a component and the bridgehead of the same ambitious system established at the very beginning of the Dynasty 4 along the two sides of the Gulf of Suez in order to reach the mining areas securely.

The goal of this article is to provide the non-Egyptological reader with some background information about the Egyptian-Coptic language, focusing on its genealogical affiliations and diachrony, as well as the types of texts in which the language is attested. For a typologically-oriented overview of some central
aspects of Egyptian- Coptic language structures, see Haspelmath (this volume).

The present study has its now faraway origin in a PhD thesis defended at the University of Basel on February 6, 2007, by the title 'La détransitivité, voix et aspect. Le passif dans la diachronie égyptienne'. The thesis was directed by Antonio Loprieno, and the secondary advisor was Pascal Vernus.

In the Book of Nut, the terms qbḥw and qbḥw nṯrw appear to designate a portion of the outermost fringes of the cosmos, to the north/north-west, where an opening of the Duat was located. This paper aims to explore the characterisation of that region, a topographical and cosmographical entity lying on the verge of this world and the next, by comparing the finds from the Book of Nut with the evidence from a Late period “map of cosmos”, on which a similar enigmatic label appears. This will provide a chance to reassess the characterisation of the cosmic boundaries of the world at the threshold of the Duat and the various regenerative scenarios conveyed by later cosmographic texts and representations.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/bifao.10285

This paper aims at investigating the polysemic patterns associated with the notion ‘soil/ earth’ by using the semantic map model as a methodological tool. We focus on the applicability of the model to the lexicon, since most of past research has been devoted to the analysis of grammatical morphemes. The most concise result of our research is a diagrammatic visualization of the semantic spaces of twenty lexemes in nine different languages, mainly ancient languages belonging to the Indo-European and the Afro-Asiatic language families. The common semantic map for the various languages reveals that the semantic spaces covered by the investigated lexemes are often quite different from one another, although common patterns can also be detected. Our study highlights some shortcomings and methodological problems of previous analyses suggesting that a possible solution to these problems is the control of the data in the existing sources of the object languages. Finally, drawing upon the cognitive linguistics literature on the various types of semantic change, we show that some of the senses of the individual lexemes are the result of the function of such mechanisms as metaphor, metonymy, and generalization.

Among the many scenes and texts that occur for the first time in the Nineteenth Dynasty cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos is a representation of the awakening of Osiris by Horus, which appears directly beneath a vignette depicting the transit of the solar barques. The annotations to this bi-partite tableau appear in a mixture of standard, hieroglyphic Egyptian and cryptographic scripts. Similar groups of scenes and texts occur in the Twentieth Dynasty royal tombs of Ramesses VI (KV9) and Ramesses IX (KV6), the Twenty-Second Dynasty tomb of Sheshonq III at Tanis (NRT5), and the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty private tomb of Mutirdis at Thebes (TT410). In addition, significant, albeit partial parallels occur on the Twenty-Second Dynasty sarcophagus of Psusennes and a Ptolemaic sarcophagus inscribed for a certain Khaf. This study offers a summary of the scenes’ iconography together with the first synoptic edition of the relevant annotations, taking into account all currently published exemplars. Many of the cryptographic texts are translated here for the first time, with improved or significantly expanded readings for other texts, which had been discussed in prior literature. The author also considers the meaning and context of the paired scenes in both royal and private monuments, in order to demonstrate the status of the bi-partite tableau as a unified composition. This composition is identified as a concise representative of the cosmological genre referred to usually as the Books of the Underworld and Sky.

BULLETIN DE L'INSTITUT FRANÇAIS D'ARCHÉOLOGIE ORIENTALE en ligne en ligne en ligne en ligne en ligne en ligne en ligne en ligne en ligne en ligne © Institut français d'archéologie orientale -Le Caire BIFAO 96 (1996), p. 289-311 MATHIEU (Bernard) Modifications de texte dans la pyramide d'Ounas.

THE scenes and texts on the northern portion of the east exterior wall of the Ramesses II court at Luxor Temple were first published in detail by K. A. Kitchen in 1964.1 At the corner where the north end of the wall joins the eastern tower of the pylon (Kitchen's section A), the lower courses were covered by debris at the time of his work. The Egyptian authorities have since excavated this area, and the complete text of the two lines of Kitchen's subsection A IV is now visible. In addition, a further inscription was revealed above a row of Asiatic prisoners. Manfred Girg is the first to have commented on this new text, which was, of course, unknown to Kitchen. Following the latter's system, G6rg designated the seven lines of the recently exposed text as A 5 (here A V).

Besides jw.f/iri SN + r + inf. in the active voice, Late Egyptian has complementary constructions to express a situation laid in the future. The predicate is either a prepositional syntagm or a pseudo-participle. These constructions, partly built on the analogy with the paradigm of the Present I, are no genuine creation of Late Egyptian, but have their roots in some well attested uses in Old and Middle Egyptian.

This paper presents a hitherto unnoticed fact about the coding of grammatical relations in Coptic: while postverbal core arguments must be overtly case-marked, preverbal core arguments are never case- marked. This feature extends the ‘no case before the verb in northeasten Africa’ generalization (König 2008, 2009) to the eastern Mediterranean, and adds Egyptian-Coptic to Berber as Afroasiatic ‘no case before the verb’ languages.

§7 Fazit
Die metonymische und metaphorische Verwendung von Körperteil-Bezeichnungen für assoziierte Handlungen darf meines Erachtens zum Grundvokabular theologischer Rede in Ägypten gezählt werden (§§5–6). Ihre Verwendung setzt nicht notwendigerweise eine körperliche Vorstellung der betreffenden Aktanten voraus (vgl. §4). Grundlage ist eine Weltwahrnehmung, in der Körperteile und mit ihnen assoziierte Handlungen kognitiv eng verknüpft sind (§3). Diese Wahrnehmung scheint aber nicht auf die antiken Kulturen beschränkt, wie eine reflektierte Betrachtung moderner Sprachen nahelegt. Als kulturspezifisch-ägyptische Besonderheiten metonymisch-funktionaler Verwendungen von Körperteil-Lexemen möchte ich folgende hervorheben (vgl. §3):
a) Emotion und Kognition ist in Ägypten ausschließlich im Leib bzw. genauer im Herzen verortet – nicht im Kopf. Im Unterschied z.B. zum Deutschen leiten sich daher vom Kopf ausschließlich Verwendungen ab, die sich auf seine hervorgehobene Position ‚ganz oben‘  Anthropomorphismus) oder ‚ganz vorne‘ (Zoomorphismus) zurückführen lassen.
b) Das Ägyptische nutzt häufiger metonymisch das ‚Gesicht‘ (ḥr) zur Ansprache des ‚Blicks‘ o.ä. (anstelle des semantisch näher liegenden ‚Auges‘ jr.t). Analog nutzt es gelegentlich den ‚Schläfenbereich‘ (mꜢꜤ) (anstelle der ‚Ohren‘) zur Ansprache des Zuhörens.
c) Das Motiv der ‚Feinde unter den Füßen/Sohlen‘ steht für politische Unterwerfung und Dominanz über den politischen Gegner.
d) Das Motiv der ‚Luft für die Nase/an die Nase‘ und des ‚Lebens an der Nase‘ steht wohl für Lebensheil. Dasselbe Motiv liegt auch einer Schöpfungstheologie zu Grunde, die den göttlichen (lichtdurchfluteten) Äther (Šw; Schu) mit dem ‚Leben‘ (Ꜥnḫ) identifiziert.
Neben weiteren finden wir die beiden Motive ‚Feinde unter den Füßen/Sohlen‘ und ‚Luft für die Nase/an die Nase‘ auch mehrfach als ‚erweckte Metaphern‘ in bildliche Medien umgesetzt (§3).

cerning land-tenure and the assessment of agricultural land is the great Wilbour Papyrus, a genuine official register, written in hieratic, dating to year 4 of Ramesses V of the Twentieth Dynasty (1142 nc).l Its great length, excellent state of preservation, and the wealth of valuable detail it contains make the Wilbour Papyrus one of the most important of all Pharaonic secular papyri. For all this, the Wilbour Papyrus poses considerable difficulties since the text as we have it does not identify either the authority under which the data were compiled, or the purpose for which the survey was made. These particulars were possibly contained at the beginning of the document, which is lost.

During excavations at the temple of Taharqa at Semna, George Reisner discovered an exceptional New Kingdom private statuette covered with short cryptographic inscriptions. The peculiar texts on this statuette, now in the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA 24.743), received a preliminary treatment by Étienne Drioton in the extensive catalogue of the Semna excavations by D. Dunham and J. Janssen (1960). Nevertheless, this object has otherwise garnered little scholarly attention. A new translation of the enigmatic texts raises important considerations for understanding both the function of cryptography in private statuary and the evolution of viceregal authority in the Eighteenth Dynasty. The texts reveal that the statue belonged to a high official from the Egyptian administration in Nubia, the jdnw n Wзwз.t (deputy viceroy of Wawat), Djehutymose. Several stylistic features of the statuette suggest a date to the reign of Amenhotep III, when Djehutymose would have been deputy to the viceroy Merymose; this administrative relationship finds additional support from a previously overlooked rock inscription in the Wadi Allaqi. This article contends that the jdnw n Wзwз.t Djehutymose should be identified with the viceroy of the same name dating to the reign of Akhenaten. Representing the earliest-known attestation of the division of the deputy viceroy position into two geographically defined offices, this small statuette provides insight into hitherto little known aspects of viceregal succession and the evolution of the dual deputy offices.

Was the individual in Ancient Egypt completely at the mercy of demons, illnesses or other threats? Or could various practices be called upon to keep the likes of these at bay? Christoffer Theis examines written and archaeological sources, which verify the magical protection of various rooms and spaces in Ancient Egypt. He presents a detailed analysis and commentary of evidence available for the protection of the land of Egypt, its temples, houses, sleeping chambers, and graves. Legacies from other contemporary cultures, such as Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Syria-Palestine region are also dealt with. Going a step further, the author compares these with Greek, Coptic, Arab and Hebrew material. The currently available sources show clearly inter- as well as trans-cultural homogeneity and identification characteristics through the local and temporal spaces.

The biographical stela of Idudju-iker, 'foremost-one of the rulers of Wawat', was excavated by the University of Pennsylvania during 2014-2015 in the royal necropolis that developed around the mortuary enclosure of Senwosret III at South Abydos. The stela had been reused, ca. 1650 BC, as a roof block on the burial chamber of the Second Intermediate Period king Woseribre Seneb-Kay. Despite its secondary context, the stela dates originally to the early 11th Dynasty. Based on a range of criteria, the originally over two-meter tall stela, can be attributed to the reign of Wahankh Antef II. Idudju-iker appears to have been an Egyptianized Lower Nubian (C-Group) ruler who was in a formal political alliance with the Theban kingdom. As such he was formally invested as a member of the royal court, and was a participant in military activities within Egypt including campaigning against the Herakleopolitan kingdom. Evidence for the existence of a formalized political relationship between a Theban 11th Dynasty king, arguably Antef II, and a primary ruler of Wawat who was embedded into the Theban court, adds new light to the dynamics of the Theban conflict with Herakleopolis and the role of Wawat and Medjay Nubians in the territorial expansion of the Theban 11th Dynasty. The surviving parts of the inscription discuss Idudju-iker’s participation in an extensive range of ceremonial and building activities at Thinis and Abydos. These activities included rituals at the temple of Onuris and other gods at Thinis, as well as the annual Osiris procession with the progress of the Neshmet barque to Poqer. Idudju-iker was the recipient of a royal dedication made in his honor, along with members of the royal court. The text explains the various activities in Thinis as having occurred 'through the desire of the rulers of the Theban nome, inasmuch as they love me'. Idudju-iker’s presence at Thinis and Abydos appears not to be the result of a pilgrimage, nor does the text reflect the range of activities performed by an official sent on commission. Rather, he appears to have been there as part of the Theban victory over the Thinite nome during the reign of Wahankh Antef II. The stela of Idudju-iker – which is comparable in size to the well-known 'Hound Stela' of king Antef II – reflects the key role of this Nubian alliance in the Theban victory in Thinis. The stela may have been set up in a commemorative chapel at Abydos at the behest of the king.

Two poetic passages of the 'Dialogue between a Man and his Ba' arise problems both in interpretation and in translation: jw mt m ḥr.j mjn mj kft pt; mj z zḫt-A1-jm r ḫmt.n.f (cc. 138-140) and wnn ms nty jm ʽḥʽ m wj3 ḥr rdt d.t stpwt jm r r'w-prw (cc. 143-145): the literal translation of these passages is problematic: " Death is for me today like an unveiling of the sky, like a man + (I acquire? who acquires?) + there + (according to? More than?) He ignores " ; " Indeed, who will be there will be standing in (Ra's) boat, allowing that someone gives the offerings there + towards? + the temples ". Integration of the verb Dd, " to say " , would transform the former passage into a direct speech and solve the problem: " Death is for me today like an unveiling of the sky, like when a man says: 'I will profit from it' about something he ignores ". This integration induces to interpret in the same way also the ḥr of latter passage: " Indeed, who will be there will be standing on (Ra's) boat, saying: 'There is where one makes offerings be given to me' about temples " , shedding better light on the sense of the adverb jm and the preposition r. Metric and rhetoric reasons support the integration in the former passage.

This paper deals with Direct Object Marking (DOM), a well-known phenomenon cross-linguistically. DOM is fully implemented in Coptic, but remains scarce in pre-Coptic Egyptian. This paper deals the emergence of DOM, relying mainly on Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian data. I first give a rapid overview of the rhematizing construction of the direct object and of the partitive construction(s) respectively. I then examine how the introduction of the preposition m with certain verbs can be explained as a detransitivizing, detelicising process before coming back to the issue of DOM in pre-Coptic Egyptian. In my conclusion, I suggest that the circumstances that favoured the appearance of DOM in Egyptian differ in some significative ways with what is generally assumed in general linguistics.

Note that this is a preliminary publication of a late Middle Kingdom/Second Intermediate Period literary composition from the Wadi el-Hôl, now replaced by an improved and expanded presentation in the Theban Desert Road Survey vol. 1 monograph.