Journal issue

“Ser” and “estar” are two Spanish copulative verbs standing for two different concepts: “ser” is the fruit of an “absolute concept” i. e. it has general meaning and it is used to make statements without specific time or situation, whereas “estar” is the fruit of a “relative concept” i. e. it has a referential meaning and it expresses statements related to a specific time or situation. The functions of “ser” and “estar” can be found also in constructions of Earlier Egyptian, where adjectival and nominal sentences have a similar function as “ser”, and the pseudoparticiple of adjectival verbs and adverbial sentences with m of predication have a similar function as “estar”.

Two Letters to the Dead from the First Intermediate Period begin with an almost identical formula presenting the letter as a ianu-appeal. The word is followed by a sequence of hieratic signs that has been interpreted in various ways. The first aim of this paper is to re-examine the three main interpretations of this sequence (n mḥnkw/nmow/n(y) mow(#)). In particular, it discusses the reading nmo (“to be biased, partial”) and considers the possibility of a reading nmw (“who? what?”). In conclusion, two possible readings are suggested: 1) the letter is presented as an appeal (Ïonw) from a living who has shown himself partial (nmow) in favour of the dead (during the funeral judgment?); or, 2) it presents a rhetorical question (nmw) introducing the defense of the plaintiff.

This paper evaluates previous grammatical interpretations of the expedition leader’s speech at the very end of the story (ShS 183-186). Subsequently, the second sentence thereof, a proverb, is identified as a participial statement containing the rare future participle ÈDm.tj (perhaps an elliptically truncated future verbal adjective ÈDm.tj=fj). Accordingly, the following translation may be proposed: “Don’t act as an excellent man, friend! It is whom who will give water to a bird at the dawn of its early slaughter?”

Discussion of the ancient Egyptian term tXbs(t), a type of basket, in different sources, including a comparison of orthographies and examination of the lexeme in each context. Evaluation of Hurrian as the source language for the Egyptian term, which also appears as a loan word in Akkadian and Ugaritic.

The paper presents the second part of an overview of connectors of Greek origin used in the two major Coptic variolects, Sahidic and Bohairic, dealing with the semantically subordinating patterns.

A recent review in this journal of my book Breathing Flesh provides the point of departure for a discussion of the possibility of approaching questions of conceptions of the body in ancient Egypt drawing on conceptual frameworks derived from outside the field of Egyptology. Along the way, this contribution also touches upon broader questions of the ideal nature of constructive scholarly debate, especially when dealing with attempts to offer new interdisciplinary perspectives on heavily entrenched traditional Egyptological positions.

The present paper continues the publication of the most remarkable monuments of a priestly family from the Ptolemaic Memphis. This time the author presents a reseach on the stela BM EA 886, the owner of which is Psherenptah III, a high priest of Ptah, husband of Taimhotep. A thorough examination of the inscription based on the digital images has resulted in a new translation accompanied with commentaries and textual notes. New interpretation of puzzling or disputable fragments is proposed. The earlier editions of the monument are discussed in detail. Moreover, the study deals with the pedigree and the history of the family in question.

When a stemma is constructed according to the traditional practice of textual criticism, one continually needs to make originality statements, i.e. decisions about which of two different readings is original and which is innovative. This kind of decision is hard to make and can be regarded as the major challenge in stemma building. This also means that numerous instances of textual deviations, namely those which do not allow for originality statements, must be left aside.
I support here the use of an alternative method, so far unused in Egyptology, which does not require originality statements during the first step of stemma construction. The result of the first step is an unrooted rather than a rooted stemma. Only in a second step, the unrooted tree is assigned an orientation. This procedure makes textual criticism easier, more objective, and more reliable at the same time. I exemplify this method by reconstructing a stemma from eight manuscripts of the story of Sinuhe.

This is a follow-up to my article on stemma construction in the discipline of textual criticism. In linguistics, too, the major challenge of genetic subgrouping is posed by the need to distinguish between shared innovations and shared retentions. The method presented here, which has been adopted from textual criticism and has never before been applied to linguistics, drops the requirement to identify shared innovations during the first step of the procedure. The result is an unrooted rather than a rooted family tree, which is assigned an orientation only in a second step. This method makes genetic subgrouping both easier and more reliable than it used to be.
I exemplify this method by constructing a genetic tree from the six accepted subgroups of the Afroasiatic language family. The resulting tree suggests that the first split-up within Afroasiatic was between Egyptian on the one side and all other languages on the other.

Earlier Egyptian wh-questions are argued to show a tripartite system of marking information structure vis-à-vis unmarked sentence construal. The use of the three strategies, termed ‘second tensing’, clefting, and wh-movement, is surveyed in the various verbal and non-verbal proposition types attested in this language.

The present article analyses spell 551 and its semantic content within the group of apotropaic formulae of the corpus of the Pyramid Texts. The obscure meaning of the discourse is apparently associated with an emotional reaction against menaces that may prevent the way of the deceased king to the Hereafter. In this hostile context the use of “specialized” terms, far from the stereotyped forms of religious discourse, makes an adequate understanding difficult. After examining literal domain we provide our translation into Catalan and English taking into account the nearest descriptive equivalent words found in some Latin locutions.

A recent publication of ‘Documents of Breathing’ in the British Museum is to be acknowledged as a considerable achievement. Still, there are some details where the reading and translation of the Egyptian texts can be improved. Furthermore, some general remarks on the language of those documents are in order. Contrary to common assumptions, they are by no means written in ordinary Middle-Egyptian. Rather those passages which do not derive from older models are couched in a vernacular language presenting many specific elements of contemporary demotic Egyptian (sometimes also in the writing of some words). These demotic elements are often not well understood in current scholarly treatment.