Sadness, anxiety and other broken hearts: the expression of negative emotions in Ancient Egyptian

This article aims at providing an overview of negative emotion expression in Ancient Egyptian, through the prism of figurative language. The general structure is as follows: after a brief introduction of the topic, the theoretical framework applied and the presentation of the corpus, the first section of the article is dedicated to lexical-level linguistic actualizations of conceptual metaphors – mostly metaphors and metonymies. These are divided in two categories: 1) single lexemes with metaphor-induced colexification and 2) compound expressions. The second section of the article deals with the concept of “false friend” metaphors, which are a major challenge in metaphor translation. The term, introduced here for the first time, refers to metaphorical expressions which, when translated literally in the target language, do correspond to an existing metaphorical expression but do not convey the same meaning as in the source language