The evolution of the ancient Egyptian afterlife between the Old and the Middle Kingdom

What is it about?

This paper analyzes the development of the conceptualization of the ancient Egyptian notion of afterlife (Duat) through an approach based on cognitive linguistics, a branch of linguistic that treats the human cognitive system and skills as having their basis in physical and sensorial experience. Linguistic structure can be proven to reflect thought processes, thus revealing the conceptual framework underlying a given language. In particular, the signs called "determinatives" or "classifyers" in the Egyptian script - which appear at the end of words - can reveal aspects of the Egyptian mindset that never materizlized in the language. Determinatives, in fact, work as iconic tools classifying the Egyptian vision of the world, providing encyclopedic, semantic, grammatical, and pragmatical information about the word they refer to, thus opening a window into the collective Egyptian mind. Being icons of cultural knowledge and categorizing such knowledge at the same time, determinatives condense many layers of meaning in themselves, and they can therefore be exploited to shed more light on how the ancient Egyptians conceptualized certain aspects of their world. This paper adopts this approach in analyzing the evolution of the elusive concept of Duat, for which a single definition cannot be achieved, since it never designated just one unambiguous place at a time. The focus here is the period between the end of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2686-2160 BCE) and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055-1650 BCE). In this span of time, two collections of funerary texts appeared and were in use, also appearing side by side on the same support. These were the Pyramid Texts, mainly inscribed in funerary chambers of pyramids of kings and queen of the late Old Kingdom, and the Coffin Texts, found chiefly on coffins (but also other supports) from the First Intermediate Period (ca. 2160-2056 BCE) onwards. By analyzing the determinatives associated with the word Duat, the otherworld, in these two collections of funerary texts, this paper will elucidate the underlying evolution of the conceptualization of the afterlife in a period during which profound changes were implemented in Egyptian society and culture, which also affected the Egyptians' vision of their prospects of life after death.

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Why is it important?

This paper analyzes the evolution of a funerary concept, the afterlife, starting from the language and script(s), the ancient Egyptian, used to convey such a notion. This approach is based on notions of cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology, two disciplines that have been increasingly playing a major role in Egyptology over the last few decades, but that are still not openly employed enough. This study representes the first attempt at tracing the development of this central cultural notion (the Duat) over time by looking at the evidence coming not only from the language and the (funerary) texts but, more importantly, from the script, where the determinatives play a key role in the understanding of the Egyptian mindset.

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