The Kemyt: towards a contextualized view of an ancient Egyptian literary letter

I here present my new project, for which I consider the Ancient Egyptian text called Kemyt (“the compilation”) with the aim of a fully textual contextualization. Quite surprisingly, despite several studies since its first mention in 1948 in Egyptological literature, there is no full analysis. My new project will offer the first comprehensive study and interdisciplinary approach of this Middle Egyptian text at the crossroads of Ancient Egyptian textual philology, palaeography (including scribal practices), and genre theory. In this paper, I will first expose the artefacts, including the 69 new witnesses, which still await proper publication, and the database I’ve created to record all these artefacts. I will then discuss the goals of my project and show a few preliminary results. As a conclusion, I will present the next steps allowing me to achieve my aim of the first fully contextualized overview of the Kemyt.