Current Research in Egyptology 2010

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Symposium

Maarten Horn, Joost Kramer, Daniel Soliman, Nico Staring, Carina van den Hoven, Lara Weiss, Joost Kramer, Daniel Soliman

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781842175644
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

After having been held in the UK for the past 10 years, the 11th edition of the annual Current Research in Egyptology (CRE) graduate conference was held at Leiden University, The Netherlands in January 2010. As always, the main aim of the conference was to provide graduate and postgraduate students of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology with the opportunity to present their research. The proceedings of this year's conference cover a wide range of topics from the Predynastic Period to modern Egypt. The papers reflect a similar variety in areas of research and scientific approach, for example, by applying the linguistic prototype theory to ancient Egyptian texts or by using an ethnoarchaeological approach for the study of modern mud-brick architecture. The topics covered include Egyptian religion, ranging from the Coffin Texts to the decoration of temple walls in Ptolemaic times, as well as sociological issues in the Middle and New Kingdom. Other contributions focus on the study of the chronology of the Middle Kingdom with the help of lunar ephemerides or well-stratified radiocarbon data versus pottery data. In summary, Proceedings of Current Research in Egyptology XI includes 19 selected papers on artefact studies, burial practices and provisioning for the afterlife, economy and sociology, history and chronological studies, linguistics, philology and religion.

Rage like an Egyptian: the conceptualization of anger

Ines Köhler

Introduction and theoretical framework

The influence of language as part of human complexity and therefore as a kind of cultural science in semantic studies may not be ignored.

Every language is the linguistic result of our perception of the world. Our perception as well as knowledge of our world depend on a culturally formed framework which is entitled to understanding and intersubjective virtue – that means reality. In this way, a world represents a (meaningful) social construct. We perceive all entities of the world, sort them into categories and give them meaning and names – so we can deal with and talk about the things in the world (cf. Berger and Luckmann 2007). In other words:

“The world is a perceived world and not a metaphysical world without a knower. Categories as we understand them exist ‘in the eye of the human beholder.’ Categorization is a cognitive human phenomenon that allows us to minimize cognitive efforts and avoids approaching dangers. Theoretically, different people or societies could divide the world into widely different categories. [...] In short, categories are anthropocentrically biased, and do not ‘exist in the world’ as such” (Goldwasser 2002, 27 – 28).

Categorization and cognitive linguistics

Categorization is attractive to linguists because categorizing something often means naming it. Knowing the meaning of a word often is to know the name of the category. Language itself is an object of categorization as well. Linguistic expressions get categorized as examples of lexical or syntactic categories, like noun, verb, etc. (cf. Taylor 2005, xi–xii).

Categorization

Perception, thinking, speaking and storage of meaning are topics the ancient Greek philosophers already reflected about. The presumption that the meaning of a word results from a conjunction of adequate quantity of common features traces back to Aristotle. The Aristotelian classical model of conceptual categories defines a category in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient features (cf. Taylor 2005, 20–23; Kleiber 1993, 12).

No entity that does not possess the full set of features can be a member of the related category. In short, a category is defined by the following:

1. Sufficient, for example possession of all features guarantees membership.

2. Membership of a category is based upon present or absent features.

3. Each member of a category has the same categorical status.

4. Categories are entities with clear-cut and rigid boundaries.

Examples such as the platypus demonstrate, however, that this rigidly defined structure of category exhibits very real structural problems. Eco (1999, 58) describes this phenomenon:

“The platypus is a strange animal. It seems to have been conceived to foil all classification, be it scientific or popular [...] its flat body is covered with a dark brown coat; it has no neck and a tail like a beaver’s; it has a duck’s beak [...] no outer ears, and the four feet have five webbed toes, bit with claws; it stays under water (and eats there) enough to be considered a fish or an amphibian. The female lays eggs but ‘breasts-feeds’ her young”.

Due to such discoveries and to the so-called black-box phenomena, the focus of human behaviour and research in general has changed: primarily, it has focussed on observable, measurable human behaviour and now it has switched to cognitive processes as part of human complexity (cf. Schwarz 1996, 13). In the course of this so-called cognitive-turn, following ethnosemantical, psychological, biological and anthropological studies were able to prove that categorization is to understand in a broad way but with fuzzy boundaries. This, however, makes it impossible to form a definite opinion about categorization (e.g. Berlin and Kay 1969; Rosch 1972a, 1972b, 1973a, 1973b).

Cognitive linguistics

Within this new approach, the most influential theory is the prototype theory which is part of the broad field of cognitive linguistics (Taylor 2005, 41). Cognitive linguistics is a conglomerate of central points of linguistic research that are clo...