Current Research

Current Research: Forensic Discourse Analysis of Ancient Egyptian Private Law Deeds

The research aims to explore new ways of dealing with Egyptian textual material, scanning syntactically a homogenous corpus of Ramesside private law deeds belonging to a specific period to obtain a genre-oriented grammar, and adding a lexico-semantic approach by analyzing categorization elements belonging to the script for a better understanding of the legal terms used in the corpus. These tools might help to overcome a fundamental lacuna in our knowledge of ancient Egyptian languages, whereas even very recent grammars (for instance those concerned with Middle Egyptian) propose examples taken from extremely remote periods (belonging to different états de langue), without distinction of genre and register. The proposed approach (textemic, syntactic analysis of the material, lexico-semantic study on the basis of the classifiers categorization system) is totally new in the field of forensic Egyptian dialects studies. The results are compared to those obtained in the analysis of the legal register of royal decrees of the same period in order to verify the existence of a coherent, specific and complex professional jargon, as well as the extreme sophistication of the ancient Egyptian legal system on the linguistic and semantic levels.