Journal issue

“The nfr-Hr-construction in the Royal stelae of the 18th Dynasty before the Amarna Period”
This article deals with the evidence of the so-called nfr-Hr-construction in the Royal stelae of the 18th dynasty before the Amarna period. After short preliminaries about the language of the Royal stelae of this period and the appearance of the nfr-Hr-construction in Earlier Egyptian and Later Egyptian in general the evidence of the corpus under observation is presented in detail. The result is that in almost all cases the nfr-Hr-construction behaves in the expectable classical manner of Earlier Egyptian. There are only few examples diverging from the standard usage. They might show a kind of “classicistic” usage, which appears to be classical, but is not attested in the earlier language periods.

In this paper, t|/tw is explained as a simplified noun originating in a masculine noun meaning “a body, a person (or similar)” in Proto-Egyptian, which was used as an indefinite subject just as “ome”/“omne” in Medieval Spanish and “man” in German when it follows an active verb form of the suffix pronoun conjugation. The historical development of the Earlier Egyptian man-impersonal verb paradigm will be studied focusing on the changes that each man-impersonal verb form with t|/tw underwent from Old Egyptian to Middle Egyptian, to conclude that the Earlier Egyptian man-impersonal verb paradigm (except in exceptional cases) permeated later forms of the language, just as it would do in other languages, such as Spanish.

“A special basilophorous Name from the Beginning of the New Kingdom”
Basilophorous names are comparatively rare during the 18th Dynasty, especially the ones containing onX. Remarkably, one is featured on the famous donation stela of Ahmose-Nefertari as the name of the depicted king’s son: [hrl] cartouche(N5:[sep=0,fix]N11[rotate=180]-F31:z) - S34 . Several aspects of his name are to debate: the function of onX as either part of the name or as an epithet, whether an honorary transposition is applied, the grammatical analysis of the name pattern, which heavily depends on the aforementioned points, and the use of the cartouche. The article discusses and evaluates these aspects, offering a schema of possible interpretations for basilophorous names containing onX.

In the third millennium BC, Ältere Komposita were a prolific kind of compound nouns with specific morphological features, above all, word stress on a non-last constituent. In order to match the stress and syllable structure patterns of younger stages of ancient Egyptian, Ältere Komposita were either mutilated or substituted with neologisms. At the same time, the graphical representation of retained Ältere Komposita became a playground for the learnèd élite between the poles of tradition and innovative substitution. This contribution explores strategies of substitution in the realms of morphology and of writing.

In 2012, excavations by the French Archaeological Mission at Saqqara uncovered several blocks bearing an inscription with remarkable parallels to the well-known biography of the Sixth Dynasty official Wnj from Abydos. These parallels led Philippe Collombert to identify the owner of the Saqqara blocks, named Nfr-wn-Mrjj-Ro, with the aforementioned Wnj. Despite their strong parallels, the two versions of the same text show a slight but interesting difference: the subordinating particle is written sk in the Saqqara version but sT in the Abydos version. These two texts then can form the core of a case study to examine these particular phonological variants in Old Egyptian texts.
In this article, I will provide a brief overview of the ⟨k⟩ > ⟨T⟩ phonological change of Early Egyptian, and then discuss other attestations of the particle sk/sT to attempt to illuminate the linguistic context for this particular change in the texts of Wnj. Finally, I will suggest a possible explanation for this change, with the linguistic analysis informed by the historical and textual background of both texts – that of an official moving his tomb away from the Capital Zone and adopting a non-Capital Zone socio-dialect in the process. The investigation of this particular sound change illustrates some of the (not insurmountable) challenges of historical linguistic studies of Old Egyptian.

This article presents a lexical-semantic analysis of the lexeme i-in:n-d:G37 jnd (Wb 1, 102.16–18) “betrübt sein, traurig sein”, “die Trauer, das Trauern”, “der Betrübte”; it contends that the current understanding of jnd requires some revision. Considering theoretical developments in the field of emotion research, namely that the conceptualisation and lexicalisation of emotions is strongly influenced by cultural attitudes, values and beliefs, and that emotion lexemes seldom have cross-cultural equivalents, it can no longer be presumed that jnd is a direct equivalent of the modern Western emotion of ‘sadness’. Based on the close contextual analysis of the surviving verbal and nominal attestations of jnd in the textual record, this article identifies and describes the senses of the lexeme and offers a diachronic analysis of how the identified senses evolved over jnd’s lifespan of use. To conclude, this article briefly considers the extent to which the revised meaning of jnd generated in this research overlaps with the anglophone semantic field of ‘sadness’.

“From chaos to metaphor. The wind regime in Neferti VIe–VIg”
This paper re-examines Neferti VIe–VIg, principally known from pPetersburg 1116B, verso 28–30 and oUC 39637, 2–3. First, the transcription of Neferti VIe in pPetersburg, 28 is discussed, concluding that the restoration of the preposition m after xsf is to be discarded. Secondly, the differences between this version of Neferti VIe and the version in oUC 39637, 2 are reviewed, deducing that they cannot be regarded as “errors”, the London version being in fact a rewriting of the section. Although both versions seem to be incompatible, the Lower Egypt wind regime, where the south wind and the north wind alternate, allows us to understand that they both actually tell the same story: Lower Egypt is dominated by the north wind. In the light of this reinterpretation of Neferti VIe, Neferti VIe–VIg can be read as a metaphor instead of a description of chaos: The north wind blowing continuously, and thereby enabling the “alien bird” (#pd DrDr) to nest and reproduce, is a metaphor for the lack of royal authority extending up to the Delta, so that the Asiatics (o#m.w) can invade it and settle there. As such, Neferti VIe–VIg is in perfect accordance with the outcome of the Prophecy of Neferti, which predicts that the saviour king will come from the South, restore royal power and sovereignty in Lower Egypt and repel the Asiatics.

“On the special development of Ayin near Het”
The consonant represented by ‹o› (so-called oAyin, but originally a voiced dental stop or spirant) shows graphic peculiarities after the Old Kingdom if the same root contains a ‹H› (Oet). This paper presents all words hitherto known to display this feature and attempts to provide a phonetic interpretation. It is argued that the regular shift of the sound represented by ‹o› towards a pharyngeal spirant was suppressed under the said condition. Instead, the consonant either preserved its original dental articulation throughout the Middle Kingdom (at the end of a syllable, as well as immediately following ‹H›), or else it was lost altogether (at the beginning of a syllable unless immediately following ‹H›). Building upon these conclusions, some additional proposals concerning the historical phonology of Egyptian are advanced.

“Once more on the sound value of Gardiner Sign-List U 23”
There has been a dispute about the reading of the sign Gardiner, Sign-List U23. I myself have given arguments that contrary to the traditional reading as mr, a more correct reading is mHr. This proposal has been accepted by a number of scholars, some of them even contributing further proof for this reading. However, others have disagreed, thus Ilona Regulski, Dimitri Meeks and especially Simon Schweitzer. The aim of this contribution is to amass all the evidence in favor of the new proposal and at the same time refute the counter-arguments against it.