About
“Writing Knowledge: Egyptian Grammar and Scholarship in the Late Period”
Ancient Egypt in the first millennium BCE and onwards had a multilingual literary and religious text-culture that produced scribal scholars at once adept in contemporary linguistic idioms—Demotic Egyptian and Greek—and also deeply concerned with older forms of their language—classical Egyptian in the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. My book project proposes a new approach to the question of scribal knowledge in these latest periods of ancient Egyptian history. It uses close philological analysis combined with broader theoretical approaches to answer the question: what did the ancient Egyptians know about their own language? I contend that, for Egyptian scribes, writing itself, rather than language (as in the modern linguistic sense), constituted a field of knowledge. Writing is linguistic because it represents language, but it is also graphic. The interplay between both of these aspects of writing is central for ancient Egypt because all three native scripts—hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic—have a semiotic component and include written elements that have no parallel in spoken language. Thus writing as a domain of knowledge cannot be reduced to language alone, and its parameters must be defined by ancient Egyptian concepts rather than circumscribed by either the contemporaneous Greek grammatical tradition or by modern disciplines like linguistics.
Katherine Davis is an Assistant Professor, Middle East Studies.
