This volume is the outcome of a workshop on Ancient Egyptian syntax held in Liege in 2011. The contributions deal with several central topics in syntactic analysis - like coordination, control and raising, gradience, or non-expression of participants - but also investigate the relationship between syntax and other domains, from morphology to pragmatics, with special attention to construction types and grammaticalization processes. The studies cover the whole Ancient Egyptian corpus, from Old Egyptian down to Coptic, in both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. All of the papers share a common concern, namely, the relationship between form and function in Ancient Egyptian grammar. As such, the papers go beyond the descriptive level and address numerous stimulating 'why?' questions.

This is a technical study of Middle Egyptian grammar aimed at enhancing our understanding of tense, mood and aspect; a difficult area of research because, as the author notes, `we have no informants, since the discovered mummies have so far stubbornly refused to speak and are not expected to change their minds in the future'.

The present volume is the long-awaited concordance of the Egyptian coffin texts. It forms the sequel to A Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Egyptian Coffin Texts by the same author. In 1961 A. de Buck published his important seven-volume corpus Egyptian Coffin Texts. The importance of these texts is considerable for a variety of reasons; they are one of the most important literary texts of classical Egypt; the many variants greatly enlarge our understanding of grammar and linguistic structures; the coffin texts are magical texts, the effectiveness of which depended upon the exact reproductions of the original spells. In this concordance the various readings of each lemma are provided in transliteration into the Latin alphabet, which makes the concordance easily accessible for those unable to read hieroglyphs. The material is divided into the morphological categories of the verb; within each category the verbs are treated in alphabetical order.

The Egyptian language, with its written documentation spreading from the Early Bronze Age (Ancient Egyptian) to Christian times (Coptic), has rarely been the object of typological studies, grammatical analysis mainly serving philological purposes. This volume offers now a detailed analysis and a diachronic discussion of the non-verbal patterns of the Egyptian language, from the Pyramid Texts (Earlier Egyptian) to Coptic (Later Egyptian), based on an extensive use of data, especially for later phases. By providing a narrative contextualisation and a linguistic glossing of all examples, it addresses the needs not only of students of Egyptian and Coptic, but also of a linguistic readership. After an introduction into the basic typological features of Egyptian, the main book chapters address morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the three non-verbal sentence types documented throughout the history of this language: the adverbial sentence, the nominal sentence and the adjectival sentence. These patterns also appear in a variety of clausal environments and can be embedded in verbal constructions. This book provides an ideal introduction into the study of Egyptian historical grammar and an indispensable companion for philological reading.