12. É. DORET

The Narrative Verbal System of Old and Middle Egyptian

1986, 240 pp.

In the last few years, our knowledge of hieroglyphic Egyptian increased mainly by studying particular groups of texts belonging to different periods and genres. Narrative already occurs as a literary genre in Old Kingdom tomb inscriptions, where high functionaries relate the most important events of their life and career.

Mr. Doret’s book is a grammatical study, with emphasis on the verbal system, of biographical inscriptions which date to the Old Kingdom and the First lntermediate Period. Texts from the First Intermediate Period seem to exhibit best the characteristics of Middle Egyptian. It would appear that the written language of this period was much closer to contemporary spoken Egyptian than was the language of Twelfth Dynasty inscriptions, which employ a distinctly literary idiom.

In his introduction, Mr. Doret discusses various current definitions of narrative, and defines the genre as it appears in his work. Each following chapter is devoted to the study of a different verb-form and presents every examples of that form which occurs in his corpus. Mr. Doret’s book also includes charts which give complete paradigms of the various verb-forms. The book concludes with an index.html of citations, an index.html of grammatical forms and terms and a bibliography.

«The Narrative Verbal System of Old and Middle Egyptian» is the first volume devoted to the study of Ancient Egypt to appear in the series «Cahiers d’Orientalisme».

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