A Look Back into Ancient Egyptian Linguistic Studies (c. 1995-2019)

Abstract

This article provides a personal overview of the last 25-year linguistic research on ancient Egyptian, the language spoken and written in Egypt since the origin of the written Egyptian civilization (c. 3150 BC) until the disappearance of Coptic as a living language (17th century AC), the longest-attested human language. With this purpose, the main theoretical approaches and their relationship to teaching ancient Egyptian at the university are reviewed. Through the analysis of the more relevant bibliography of the period, four productive research lines are discussed: form and function; documents and the language; lexicon and grammar; and ancient Egyptian metalinguistics. The article ends with a short comment on the need of more corpus-based studies in the future instead of theoretically-based frameworks for interpreting the ancient Egyptian language.

Keywords

• middle eastern studies
• historiography
• bibliographies
• ancient history
• egyptology