Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
of the elite tombs, we can not be certain when we ascribe particular events as the
driving force behind changes in our data.
This also includes assumptions such as whether the occurrence of a certain theme
on a wall with a minimum of registers should lead to allusions on its relative
importance, and that walls with a small number of registers thus display the 'basic
needs' of decorative programme.In this presentation I will discuss the questions posed
within and results for the internal and external aspects concerning the studied themes.
A special focus will be on the occurrence of the animals, their distribution and
development, per theme as well as inter-thematical, on a geographical and
chronological level. 148 The results for these data, as abstracted from the quantitative
data, will be presented and discussed.
To summarize, an outline of the possible questions, its applicability and final
results of the above mentioned theoretical considerations in the practice of tomb
decoration will be given. It will be emphasized that a detailed study of scene content
has the potential of arriving at statements on several subjects, where it concerns the
tomb's iconographic programme as a whole.
Linguistic artificiality in the verbal system of the Tuthmoside era
Andreas Stauder
Any attempt to model the much-discussed transition from (essentially synthetic)
Earlier Egyptian to (essentially analytic) Later Egyptian calls for a thorough
questioning of the very nature of the extant written record. Far from yielding a linear
diachrony, the empirically accessible varieties of Egyptian increasingly appear as a
series of ‘snapshots’, heavily determined by the varying cultural dialectics in the use
of written language in a society underlying strong constraints of decorum. This is true
in particular for the language of the crucial period of the 18th dyn., which, leaving
aside a few letters, is essentially known through official productions. On a most
general level, the exuberance and redundancy of the verbal paradigms as empirically
gathered by Th. Ritter for the corpus of Urkunden IV 149 cannot reflect any kind of
reasonably functional synchronic linguistic system. Besides raising strong suspicion
about the homogeneity of the investigated corpus 150 , this suggests that further features
of the verbal system of Eighteenth Dynasty “official” texts might be “artificial”
altogether.
“Artificiality” is to be understood as a cover term for several different phenomena.
A case of plain archaism is shown by the de-transitive tw constructions. The
categorial reanalysis of the morpheme tw, from marker of verbal inflection to
personal morph, is effective as early as Twelfth Dynasty. 151 In “official” Eighteenth
Dynasty texts however, one comes across de-transitive tw constructions with an overt
agent introduced in syntactic periphery by means of jn, that is to say, construed as if
they were still morphological passives.
148
Over 30 identified species accounting for a total number of around 1000 animals.
149
Th. RITTER, Das Verbalsystem der königlichen und privaten Inschriften : XVIII. Dynastie bis
einschliesslich Amenophis III., GOF IV 30 (Wiesbaden, 1995).
150
J. WINAND, ‘Une grammaire de l’égyptien de la 18e dynastie’ (review article of Ritter 1995),
OLZ 92 (1997), 293-313.
151
A. STAUDER, La détransitivé, voix et aspect. Le passif dans la diachronie égyptienne, forthcoming
in Aegyptiaca Helvetica, 2008.
242