The Egyptian language at the time of the nineteenth dynasty

Abstract

The Nineteenth Dynasty, which ushered in the Ramesside period in ± 1308 B.C.E. is an important period in which to study the development of the Egyptian language, falling as it does between the time of the Middle Egyptian (ME) idiom and the Late Egyptian (LE) language. Regarding the Egyptian language, Gardiner (1982:1) writes" ... the idiom in which the public records of the Twentieth Dynasty are couched differs widely from that found, for example in the royal decrees of the Sixth Dynasty". There was a gradual change from a "synthetic" language in ME into an "analytical" one in LE and later Coptic. The synthetic tenses are first supplemented and then gradually replaced by "analytic" forms. And this happened during the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty. This thesis addresses the Nineteenth Dynasty texts, with respect to grammar, semantics and syntax (mainly verbal forms). It studies the occurrence of Middle Egyptian synthetic forms and Late Egyptian analytic forms in the Nineteenth Dynasty texts and makes observations on forms which appear to be unique to the Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian (NDE) too. This study describes and analyses the language, both in a synchronic way - "frozen" in its time (as a type of grammar book), and comparing literary and non-literary uses of the time, - and in a diachronic manner, seeking to show the evolution and development of language forms, their ancestors and their successors. A study of these texts as shown in this thesis demonstrates that the written language of the Nineteenth Dynasty is a unique blend of grammatical and syntactic forms: pure ME forms, LE literary and non-literary forms, as well as forms peculiar to NDE. Thus NDE is "an independent self-sufficient system, which is neither Middle Egyptian nor Late Egyptian of the Twentieth Dynasty." (Groll 1973:70)