Probleme der Ägyptologie – serie

This volume presents a new reading of an extraordinary Proto-Coptic magical text. Papyrus British Museum EA 10808 features a unique spell for a victim of divine wrath composed in the liturgical language of ancient Egypt but in Greek script with a few Demotic signs.Sederholm reveals a coherent and distinctive text that contributes to the illumination of Egyptian thought in the Graeco-Roman Period just before the great shutdown of the ancient temple learning.In nine chapters of transcription, translation, and commentary, Sederholm considers such features as taboo, secrecy, and the efficacy of magical words and names. He also discusses the destructive nature of the stars and the role of Fate in the bloody slaughter of divine enemies within the text.

The present work proposes a novel analysis of Complement Clauses in Earlier Egyptian language. Contrary to previous assumptions, the grammatical organisation of these constructions is shown to be based on differentiation between Realis and Irrealis modality. The different types of complement clauses attested in Earlier Egyptian are surveyed utilising recent linguistic research on modality and pragmatics. The discussion is based on numerous examples from the ancient texts and on comparisons with many other languages. Emerging from this investigation is a coherent and principled system for expressing Realis and Irrealis meaning in this most ancient of written languages.This book is of notable value to Egyptologists working with texts and to all those interested in modality, grammar, and cognition.

Egyptian historiography is determined by the fact that transmission of the historical record is left to chance. Ludwig Morenz therefore develops a method of “fragmentarily thick description,” borrowing terminology from anthropologist Clifford Geertz, as a way of addressing the holes left in the record while still arriving at as complete a picture of the third century BCE Gebelein society as possible. From this localized perspective, a new understanding of the region’s culture, including conceptualizations of the landscape, the socio-economic situation, the mentality of the people and their methods of discourse, arises.Even with this new method the private realities of the men, women, and children can remain in shadows. However, it is possible, as a result of the descriptive model, to better understand the sources at hand and to draw connections among intellectual-, economic-, and social-historical frameworks. Utilizing Morenz’s method widens our understanding of the traditionally undervalued “dark” times of the third century BCE Gebelein region. Upon closer examination of the socio-economic and mentalities history, the transformation of Egyptian society emerges as colorful and contradictory.

In Foreigners and Egyptians in the Late Egyptian Stories Camilla Di Biase-Dyson applies systemic functional linguistics, literary theory and New Historicist approaches to four of the Late Egyptian Stories and shows how language was exploited to establish the narrative roles of literary protagonists. The analysis reveals the shifting power dynamics between the Doomed Prince and his foreign wife and the parody in the depiction of the Hyksos ruler Apophis and his Theban counterpart Seqenenre. It also sheds light on the weight of history in the sketch of the Rebel of Joppa and the general Djehuty and explains the interplay of social expectations in the encounters between the envoy Wenamun and the Levantine princes with whom he seeks to trade."Overall, Di Biase-Dyson’s monograph is an original interdisciplinary examination of an exciting corpus of ancient literary texts." Nikolaos Lazaridis, Journal of Near Eastern Studies

Egyptologists have been debating for decades about whether or not Egyptian images classify as art. Nevertheless, the term ‘art’ still serves as a guiding concept for Egyptology. Kai Widmaier offers an overview of how different art-historical interpretive methods influence Egyptological research. His study demonstrates that, due to its adherence to the term art, Egyptology has considerably dissociated Egyptian images from their original contexts. Bilderwelten combines the analysis of Egyptian images from the 6th to the 18th Dynasty with methodological reflection. This leads to both a new terminology of style as well as to an alternative approach to Egyptian images. By differentiating systematically between Egyptian images and Egyptological art, this book lays the foundation for an Egyptology that follows the path of Visual Studies instead of adhering to questionable art-historical methods.

This study tackles pertinent questions about daily life and socio-economic interactions in the late Ptolemaic town of Pathyris (186-88 BCE) through an empirically grounded network analysis of 428 Greek and Demotic documents associated with 21 archives from the site.The author moves beyond traditional boundaries of Egyptological and Papyrological research by means of an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology – zigzagging back and forth between archaeological field survey, close reading of ancient texts, formal methods of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and explanatory theories and concepts borrowed from economics and other social sciences.This is volume 1 of a two-volume set.