First-Person Singular Stative Endings in the Coffin Texts: The Case for Regional Conditioned Variation

One of the more interesting features of the first-person stative in Ancient Egyptian is that the graphical form of the ending occurs into four main types: .k, .ki҆, .kw and .kwi҆. In the doctoral dissertation of the author, it was shown that there are regional preferences for one ending type over another in the Coffin Texts. However, this was only based on the data selected for this study, and did not cover the entire corpus as published in de Buck. In this article, the author shows the graphical variation in the first person stative ending of the entire corpus of de Buck, and includes some material outside the corpus of de Buck as well. The author will not only show the regional influence on the graphical form of the ending, but will take textual context, graphical context, spatial context and temporal context into regard as well, to form a clear image of the processes that creates the variation in the graphical form of the first-person stative ending in the Coffin Texts.