This volume presents a novel analysis of complement clauses in Earlier Egyptian language. The grammar of these constructions is shown to be organised around a system for expressing Irrealis and Realis modality.

The Egyptian language, with its written documentation spreading from the Early Bronze Age (Ancient Egyptian) to Christian times (Coptic), has rarely been the object of typological studies, grammatical analysis mainly serving philological purposes. This volume offers now a detailed analysis and a diachronic discussion of the non-verbal patterns of the Egyptian language, from the Pyramid Texts (Earlier Egyptian) to Coptic (Later Egyptian), based on an extensive use of data, especially for later phases. By providing a narrative contextualisation and a linguistic glossing of all examples, it addresses the needs not only of students of Egyptian and Coptic, but also of a linguistic readership. After an introduction into the basic typological features of Egyptian, the main book chapters address morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the three non-verbal sentence types documented throughout the history of this language: the adverbial sentence, the nominal sentence and the adjectival sentence. These patterns also appear in a variety of clausal environments and can be embedded in verbal constructions. This book provides an ideal introduction into the study of Egyptian historical grammar and an indispensable companion for philological reading.

In Ancient Egyptian Letters to the Dead: The Realm of the Dead through the Voice of the Living Julia Hsieh investigates the beliefs and practices of communicating with the dead in ancient Egypt as evidenced through extant Letters and provides detailed textual analysis.

In the House of Heqanakht: Text and Context in Ancient Egypt gathers Egyptological articles in honor of James P. Allen, Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University.

This is the first synthesis on Egyptian enigmatic writing (also referred to as "cryptography") in the New Kingdom (c.1550-1070 BCE). Enigmatic writing is an extended practice of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, set against immediate decoding and towards revealing additional levels of meaning. This first volume consists of studies by the main specialists in the field. The second volume is a lexicon of all attested enigmatic signs and values.

In Foreigners and Egyptians in the Late Egyptian Stories Camilla Di Biase-Dyson applies systemic functional linguistics, literary theory and New Historicist approaches to four of the Late Egyptian Stories and shows how language was exploited to establish the narrative roles of literary protagonists. The analysis reveals the shifting power dynamics between the Doomed Prince and his foreign wife and the parody in the depiction of the Hyksos ruler Apophis and his Theban counterpart Seqenenre. It also sheds light on the weight of history in the sketch of the Rebel of Joppa and the general Djehuty and explains the interplay of social expectations in the encounters between the envoy Wenamun and the Levantine princes with whom he seeks to trade. "Overall, Di Biase-Dyson’s monograph is an original interdisciplinary examination of an exciting corpus of ancient literary texts." Nikolaos Lazaridis, Journal of Near Eastern Studies

In 1991, William Croft suggested that negative existentials (typically lexical expressions that mean ‘not exist, not have’) are one possible source for negation markers and gave his hypothesis the name Negative Existential Cycle (NEC). It is a variationist model based on cross-linguistic data. For a good twenty years following its formulation, it was cited at face-value without ever having been tested by (historical)-comparative data. Over the last decade, Ljuba Veselinova has worked on testing the model in a comparative perspective, and this edited volume further expands on her work. The collection presented here features detailed studies of several language families such as Bantu, Chadic and Indo-European. A number of articles focus on the micro-variation and attested historical developments within smaller groups and clusters such as Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, and Nanaic. Finally, variation and historical developments in specific languages are discussed for Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Moksha-Mordvin (Uralic), Bashkir (Turkic), Kalmyk (Mongolic), three Pama-Nyungan languages, O’dam (Southern Uto-Aztecan) and Tacana (Takanan, Amazonian Bolivia). The book is concluded by two chapters devoted to modeling cyclical processes in language change from different theoretical perspectives. Key notions discussed throughout the book include affirmative and negative existential constructions, the expansion of the latter into verbal negation, and subsequently from more specific to more general markers of negation. Nominalizations as well as the uses of negative existentials as standalone negative answers figure among the most frequent pathways whereby negative existentials evolve as general negation markers. The operation of the Negative Existential Cycle appears partly genealogically conditioned, as the cycle is found to iterate regularly within some families but never starts in others, as is the case in Bantu. In addition, other special negation markers such as nominal negators are found to undergo similar processes, i.e. they expand into the verbal domain and thereby develop into more general negation markers. The book provides rich information on a specific path of the evolution of negation, on cyclical processes in language change, and it show-cases the historical-comparative method in a modern setting.