Book Review: The Cosmos of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan

Abstract

themselves presented as defining elements in the choice of a syntax. His wide exemplification focuses on the range of sentence patterns that are self-standing ('asyndetic'), and their underlying syntax. Particular emphasis lies on the patterns in which a subject is followed by an adverbial construction ('syntagm'): adverbial sentences, pseudo-verbal constructions and second tenses.! The importance of these constructions is explained as a historical development (pp. 39-42), marking the process by which the characteristic word order of earlier Egyptian-Verb-Subject-Object-was converted to the order of Subject-Verb-Object that characterises the latest stage of the language. Here, in practice, Vernus's eclectic and ad hoc approach wobbles into internal contradiction, since his core presentation is reminiscent of the structuralist paradigm: a structuralist explanation of the syntax as subject + adverb(ial transposition), where surely it would be preferable to account for the variety of forms that can follow a subject as a range of etymologically and structurally varied grammaticalisations. The final section of the book addresses the existence of an 'indicative srjm=f in Middle Egyptian: a declarative present tense srjm=f, that is self-standing and syntactically complete. The collection of examples is large, but problematic, confused by the question of archaism and the often rather peculiar or special registers in which the relevant texts are written. Nevertheless Vernus concludes that there is a small core of real examples. Like all the suffix conjugations that have a word order of Verb-Subject-Object, he defines it as recessive in the language, but with a genuine existence integrated into the discourse register of Middle Egyptian. The great merit of this slim volume lies in its emphasis on linguistic complexity, through its attack on the application of an ahistorical conception of language to the study of Egyptian, and on the habit of teaching Egyptian as a sort of logical construct, claimed to have its roots in a set of structural universals of syntax (pp. 42-3). Vernus largely avoids the trap of appeal to undocumentable etymology in the structuring of his argument, the appeal that has historically informed all attempts to describe a systematic paradigm of Egyptian verb forms according to function, whether that functional organisation is one of tense or aspect or syntactic position. Yet in his emphasis on semantic and syntactic complexity he seems to provide justification for an ad hoc pick-and-mix approach to the use of linguistic theories, and, where convenient, he relies happily on much the same analytical criteria and techniques he criticises so strongly in the 'Standard Theory'. Underlying the book is a particular, often idiosyncratic, and extraordinarily condensed view of the overall structure of classical Egyptian that cannot be satisfactorily summarised in a review; the implied subtleties of its argument, but also the elusive contradictions in its detailed presentation, range too wide. The result, then, is a book that contains a string of highly perceptive fragments. For instance, Vernus is evidently correct to stress that the structure of a living language cannot be entirely reducible to simple binary paradigms, and therefore analysis on such a basis cannot provide a complete explanation for form and function in Egyptian, but he does not then provide a systematic, rule-based structure for dealing with the mass of Egyptian data. In the end it is Pascal Vernus's wonderful eye for a telling example, and the systematic implications that can be pointed out in the analysis of individual examples for the understanding of a (once) living language that compensate for the, one has to say, intellectual evasiveness of the polemic mode. The book is in the final analysis fun, and deeply thought provoking, but without in the end convincing the reader that it has constructed the new paradigm.