A Grammar Of The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts...

Ancient Egyptian was first written in the Hieroglyphic script, which famously utilizes signs that look like people, animals and natural and manmade objects, but actually represent consonantal and semi-vowel phonemes, groups of phonemes and classifiers. The earliest texts written in Hieroglyphs, from around 3200 BCE to 2600 BCE, consisted of names, labels and short accounts without much grammar. The first stage of ancient Egyptian with recognizable grammar is Old Egyptian, which was primarily used during the Old Kingdom from around 2600 BCE to 2100 BCE. Old Egyptian was written in Hieroglyphs and is best known from the funerary texts inscribed inside of royal burial chambers in pyramids and known as Pyramid Texts, and the autobiographies inscribed in private tombs.

James P. Allen received his PhD from the University of Chicago. Before joining Brown in 2007, Prof. Allen was an epigrapher with the University of Chicago's Epigraphic Survey, Cairo Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, and curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2008 to 2015, he was President of the International Association of Egyptologists.

Prof. Allen's research interests include ancient Egyptian grammar and literature, religion, and history. He has written extensively on these subjects, including Genesis in Egypt: the Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (Yale, 1988), Middle Egyptian: an Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge, 2000; 2010, 2014), The Heqanakht Papyri (MMA, 2002), The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), The Debate between a Man and His Soul (Brill, 2011), The Ancient Egyptian Language, an Historical Study (Cambridge, 2013), Middle Egyptian Literature: Eight Literary Works (2014), and The Grammar of the Pyramid Texts, Vol. 1: Unis. His most recent work has been on Ancient Egyptian Phonology (to be published by Cambridge University Press) and Ancient Egyptian Thought (to be published by the American University in Cairo Press).

Download

For the last few years I have been working primarily on the Pyramid Texts, the oldest substantial body of ancient Egyptian literature. Most recently, I have begun work on a comprehensive grammar of the Pyramid Texts, which does not yet exist. To that end, I recently compiled a new concordance of all published sources from the Old Kingdom, a six-volume work that has been made freely available online ( _ojF8f_), the first volume of my grammar, dedicated to the oldest Pyramid Texts, those of Unis (Dyn. V, ca. 2323 BC), and the second volume, on the Pyramid Texts of queen Neith (Dyn. VI, ca. 220 BC), now in progress. In 2018, I completed a study of Egyptian phonology and a compilation of my thoughts on ancient Egyptian thought.

The Pyramid Texts are the oldest body of extant literature from ancient Egypt. First carved on the walls of the burial chambers in the pyramids of kings and queens of the Old Kingdom, they provide the earliest comprehensive view of the way in which the ancient Egyptians understood the structure of the universe, the role of the gods, and the fate of human beings after death. Their importance lies in their antiquity and in their endurance throughout the entire intellectual history of ancient Egypt. This volume contains the complete translation of the Pyramid Texts, including new texts recently discovered and published. It incorporates full restorations and readings indicated by post-Old Kingdom copies of the texts and are the first translation that presents the texts in the order in which they were meant to be read in each of the original sources.

38c6e68cf9