The narrative structure of ancient Egyptian tales: From 'Sinuhe' to 'Setna'

Among the vast number of texts to have survived from ancient Egypt, the corpus of literary tales forms one of the most well-known and extensively studied groups. Thus far, however, analyses of the tales have focused on individual texts and language phases without examining the relationship between tales of different phases. My dissertation addresses this gap, examining how changes in grammar from phase to phase affected how a tale was told. This project focuses on three phases of the ancient Egyptian language: Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, and Demotic.;Chapter 1 surveys prior scholarship and outlines the methodology of the project. My analyses begin on the level of the clause and move outward to examine the relationship of clauses within sentences and sentences within paragraphs, thereby exploring how the grammatical components of a tale combine to tell a story.;Chapter 2 focuses on the Middle Kingdom tales of Sinuhe, The Shipwrecked Sailor, and The Eloquent Peasant, the earliest extant Egyptian tales. Although all three use the same basic grammatical forms, each displays a dramatic difference in the distribution of the various forms. This chapter articulates the stylistic differences between the three tales and discusses their position at the beginning of the Egyptian literary tradition.;The texts examined in Chapter 3, the tales of Papyrus Westcar and Neferkare and the General, represent a significant departure from the Middle Kingdom tales, being more loosely structured; in this respect, they seem to reflect the influence of the tradition of oral story-telling. I analyze these texts in conjunction with contemporary historical narratives (royal inscriptions and private biographies) in order to trace the stylistic and grammatical shift from the Middle Kingdom tales to the Late Egyptian tales.;Chapter 4 establishes the characteristic features of the corpus of Late Egyptian tales, comparing these texts to the less easily definable Report of Wenamon. The exact nature of Wenamon has been much debated, some modern scholars regarding it as a highly literary factual report, others as a tale framed as a report. I argue that the grammar of Wenamon differs in significant ways from that of other Late Egyptian narratives, both literary and documentary, and thus the text truly belongs in a category all its own.;Similarly, Chapter 5 focuses on the problematic Petition of Petiese, which also sits on the border between literary and documentary. As well, the chapter discusses three other texts of Egypt's Late Period which illustrate the breadth of linguistic and paleographic possibility available at that time: the Piye Stela, the Bentresh Stela, and Papyrus Vandier. .;The range of grammatical forms used in the narrative of the Demotic tales analyzed in Chapter 6 is much smaller than that found in the Middle and Late Egyptian tales. Individual tales do exhibit some degree of structural sophistication, each telling its story in a different way. On the whole, however, the Demotic tales are extremely homogenous in style; I identify the key characteristics of the tales and explore their relationship to oral and written traditions.;Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation with an examination of the differences and similarities between tales of different periods, highlighting continuities and changes in the narrative structure of the tales from Middle Egyptian through Late Egyptian to Demotic. Tales served as a mechanism by which individual Egyptians could explore the world around them through narrative. In my dissertation, I examine how Egyptian tales use language to give shape to story, analyzing individual tales and then situating those tales within the larger corpus of Egyptian narrative, a broad-based approach to the language of the tales which has not yet been taken elsewhere.