Harvard Egyptological Studies Signs, Language, and Culture: the Semograms of Pyramid Texts between Iconicity Referential Reality

This volume gathers the latest research by specialists studying the relationship between hieroglyphic sign, text, and referential reality in the Pyramid Texts of Old Kingdom Egypt, on the basis that hieroglyphs and their real referents are precious sources for mutual study. The signs of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing are pictograms, i.e. images that represent beings and objects of reality. The main characteristic of pictograms is their iconicity. An icon conveys meaning through the image, which distinctly refers to a real referent by depicting several of its defining features. This volume focuses on semograms, which are lexical or semantic pictograms, meaning the image itself participates directly in the encoding of the linguistic message. The Pyramid Texts of the late 3rd millennium BCE constitute the oldest corpus of funerary texts in Egyptian and human history. Their semograms iconically reflect cultural realities of Old Kingdom Egypt and perhaps earlier. The studies you will find in this book are devoted to the dialectics between text, sign, iconicity, and referential reality.