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Print Price: $126.50

Format:
Hardback
416 pp.
87 b/w illustrations, 156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198768104

Publication date:
January 2018

Imprint: OUP UK

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

Edited by Jennifer Cromwell and Eitan Grossman

Series : Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the actual people who produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. While traditional research has focused on identifying a "pure" or "original" text behind the actual manuscripts that have come down to us from pre-modern Egypt, the volume looks instead at variation - different ways of saying the same thing - as a rich source for understanding the complex social and cultural environments in which scribes lived and worked, breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as "free" or indicative of "corruption". As such, it presents a novel reconceptualization of scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural environments. Introducing to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, among others, the authors then apply them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format. After first presenting this conceptual framework, they demonstrate how it has been applied to better-studied pre-modern societies by drawing upon the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English, before proceeding to a series of case studies applying these concepts to scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from the languages and writing systems of Pharaonic times, to those of Late Antique and Islamic Egypt.

Readership : Egyptology, classical studies, historical sociolinguistics, ancient history, Coptology, and Jewish studies.

Frontmatter
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
1. E. Grossman and J. Cromwell: Scribes, repertoires, and variation
2. M. Stenroos: From scribal repertoire to text community: the challenge of variable writing systems
3. A. Bergs: Set them free?! Investigating spelling and scribal variation in language and history
4. S. Polis: Linguistic variation in Ancient Egyptian: an introduction to the state of the art (with special attention to the community of Deir el-Medina)
5. S. Polis: The scribal repertoire of Amennakhte son of Ipuy: describing variation across Late Egyptian registers
6. J. Winand: Words of thieves
7. K. Ryholt: Scribal habits at the Tebtunis temple library: on materiality, formal features, and palaeography
8. J. F. Quack: On the regionalisation of Roman-period Egyptian hands
9. R. Mairs: *k*a*t`*a *t`*o *d*u*v*a*t'*o*v: Demotic-Greek translation in the archive of the Theban choachytes
10. H. Halla-aho: Scribes in private letter writing: linguistic perspectives
11. W. Clarysse: Letters from high to low in the Greco-Roman period
12. J. Cromwell: Greek or Coptic? Scribal decisions in 8th century Egypt (Thebes)
13. A. Boud'hors: Copyist and scribe: two professions for a single man? Palaeographical and linguistic observations on some practices of the Theban region according to Coptic texts from the 7th-8th centuries
14. T. S. Richter: A scribe, his bag of tricks, what it was for, and where he got it. Scribal registers and techniques in Bodl.Mss.Copt.(P) a.2 & 3
15. E.-M. Wagner and B. Outhwaite: 'These Two Lines. . .': Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic letter-writing in the Classical Genizah period
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index

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Jennifer Cromwell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen. She previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford and at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her work focuses on social and economic history in late antique Egypt (fifth to eighth centuries CE), utilizing the original textual material, primarily in Coptic, from villages and monasteries along the Nile Valley. Her current projects include the publication of the non-literary Coptic papyri in the University of Copenhagen, a study of life at the monastery of Apa Thomas at Wadi Sarga, and the publication of a corpus of Coptic school texts in Columbia University with Professor Raffaella Cribiore of NYU.

Eitan Grossman is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work focuses on the study of variation and change in language, both within individual languages and across languages. Beyond Ancient Egyptian-Coptic, he also works on Nuer, a Nilotic language of South Sudan, and several other languages. Among his recent publications is Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective (de Gruyter Mouton), co-edited with Martin Haspelmath and Tonio Sebastian Richter.

Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
Proxeny and Polis - William Mack
The Use of Documents in Pharaonic Egypt - Christopher Eyre
Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt - Benjamin Kelly

Special Features

Utilizes an innovative sociolinguistic methodology to bring the study of scribal texts out of the domain of a language-specific philological discipline into a broader set of theoretical concerns.
Focuses on a diverse range of non-Western European languages, highlighting comparative issues and providing invaluable comparative data for scholars interested in scribes outside this well-studied region.
Highlights historical and linguistic (dis)continuities in a single geographical location over thousands of years.
Offers analysis of different types of scribal variation across a wide variety of textual genres.