About “egyptianity” and “foreignness” in Egyptian texts. A context-sensitive lexical study

Many interesting studies have already been published about the relations between Egypt and its neighbours. I once more would like to return to this question, through a lexical study. I here propose to examine texts from the Old Kingdom until the Third Intermediate Period, with a special focus on the New Kingdom. I present a context-sensitive lexical analysis of qualifiers and expressions related to foreigners, including the distribution of the classifiers. In so doing, I situate the respective places of Asiatics, Nubians and Libyans on the Egyptian’s mental world and I will retrace the chrono- logical evolution of these connections. This study focuses on the evolutionary process of both concepts of “Egyptianity” and “foreignness”, and on the economy of the continuum between these two ends. The final aim is thus to provide new elements in light of a corpus-based study in order to solve—at least partially—the dichotomy between ongoing stereotypes and actual individuals.