Abstract
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Writing a history of the development of the ancient Egyptian mind, wrote the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt a century and a half ago, "is an impossibility." While the ancient Egyptian civilization came to an end thousands of years ago, traces of their environment, art, architecture, tombs, and household objects still remain in Egypt and abroad in museums around the world. What does not remain--what cannot remain--are tangible samples of ancient Egyptian emotion. The premise of this dissertation is that the emotions of ancient Egypt were in some very significant respects different from our own concepts of emotion, and that these differences are absolutely essential to our understanding of ancient Egyptian literature and culture. The textual excavation of ancient Egyptian emotion in literature, as well as of fossilized cognitive and emotional associations embedded in hieroglyphic semantic determinatives, contributes to the historicization of emotion, and reveals something as well about our own views about emotion, such as the nature of particular emotions, specifically anger, hatred, shame, pride, happiness, grief, fear and pity, and the category of emotion itself. Emotion, meaning, cognition, and psychology are essential to understanding the way in which societies are structured and enacted, and narrative is intimately associated with emotion. The emotional make-up, nuances, and texture of a culture are not merely details; rather, they are fundamental to a culture and its structures, beliefs, and practices. Trying to understand the landscape of ancient Egyptian emotion may be one of the last frontiers in trying to understand the ancient Egyptian mind and culture--how they felt in their world, how they embodied emotion, how they used language to convey emotion, and how they imagined emotion. Ancient Egyptian literature is perhaps our only gateway into accessing the last remnants of ancient Egyptian emotion. This survey and excavation of the emotional landscape of ancient Egyptian literature aims to present a more humanized, nuanced, and three-dimensional past, and calls into question our own modern notions about specific emotions and the category of emotion itself.
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