A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts

A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts is designed as a six-volume study of the earliest comprehensive corpus of ancient Egyptian texts, inscribed in the pyramids of five pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2325–2150 BC) and several of their queens. The first volume, devoted to the earliest corpus, that of Unis, is based on a database that allows for detailed analysis of the orthography of the texts and every aspect of their grammar; it includes a complete hieroglyphic lexicon of the texts and a consecutive transcription and translation on facing pages. The grammatical analysis incorporates both the most recent advances in the understanding of Egyptian grammar and a few new interpretations published here for the first time.

James P. Allen is Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University, a position he took up in 2007 after serving as curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has published extensively on ancient Egyptian grammar and texts, including Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyph (now, in its third edition, the most widely-used teaching grammar) and The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (a complete translation, now in its second edition). He is one of a handful of scholars currently engaged in a radical revision of our understanding of the ancient Egyptian language.