Linguistic Heterogeneity in the Ramesside Royal Inscriptions

This study examines the concurrent use of simultaneously existing written varieties of the Egyptian language in the highest written register of the Ramesside era (ca. 1292–1077 BCE): the Ramesside royal inscriptions. “Old” and “new” are defined as emic categories in this framework and are applied to linguistic features that can be associated with either distinctively past or distinctively contemporary layers of the Egyptian language. The analysis builds on a detailed, multi-layered methodological approach that takes into account not only the grammatical but also the lexical and graphical selections of the inscriptions. The work is a qualitative, exploratory study with a focus on five in-depth case studies: Seti I’s Kanais Inscription, Merenptah’s Hermopolis Stela, Ramesses III’s Great Double Stela, and Ramesses IV’s Great Hammamat Inscription and Great Abydos Stela to Osiris and the Gods. The research demonstrates that the linguistic heterogeneity of the Ramesside royal inscriptions can be interpreted as the linguistic manifestation of the Ramesside kings’ cultural and political identity: a balancing act between tradition and innovation. As the study experiments with basic quantitative techniques, it makes complex linguistic data accessible to a broader Egyptological audience as well by graphically representing grammatical, lexical, and orthographic information.