Regional variation in the Coffin Texts: A study of sentence structure, verbal structure and graphical forms

In the pursuit of regional variation in Ancient Egypt on a linguistic level, this thesis proposes to use the mortuary liturgy of the Coffin Texts as a base from which to extract signs of regionally conditioned variation in the language. In this thesis, three approaches were used in order to visualize the existence of regional variation in the Middle Egyptian language. In the first approach, the sentence structure was compared. Using the metaphor that spells could be treated as proteins, biomedical algorithms were used for cluster analysis of the structure. The second approach tackles the verbal structure of the sentences instead, applying the same method which was used for the sentence structure. Finally, the graphical form of the verbal lemmas was studied in order to show preferences for spelling and written structure. Additionally, the graphical form of morphological features of verbal constructions was studied. The approaches used in this thesis were able to visualize that regional conditioned patterns exist within the Coffin Texts.