Linguistic Dating of Middle Egyptian Literary Texts

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.