New Project: Nile in Contact—Historical linguistic analysis of Egyptian historical-biographical inscriptions from the third and second millennium BC found in the area between the First and the Fifth Cataract.
Nile in Contact is a multidisciplinary project intended to shed light on the Egyptian cultural influence on Nubia in the third and second millennium BC by applying a historical-linguistic approach to the study of hieroglyphic inscriptions found between Aswan and Kurgus in order to understand the evolution of Egyptian in Nubia from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom. It is an innovative project not only because of its multidisciplinary methodology, but also because it has already identified a set of inscriptions not studied yet as a whole by Egyptologists or Nubiologists.
In addition, Nile in Contact aims to address issues of great interest both to the scientific community and to society at large, such as the advantages and disadvantages of multilingual societies or the causes of linguistic change in the evolution of languages. To this end, an English translation of every inscription and a philological comment will be included in the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA). This will enrich the literature on Egyptology and Nubiology, for so far only first millennium BC hieroglyphic inscriptions found in the area
between Aswan and Kurgus have been translated and provided with a philological analysis in the first two volumes of Fontes Historiae Nubiorum. Textual Sources for the History of the Middle Nile Region between the Eighth Century BC and the Sixth Century AD (see Eide, T., Hägg, T., Pierce, R., Török, L. (eds.) 1994–1996).
This project will provide new data on the Egyptian language and its use in Nubia leading to a better understanding of the historical relations between Egypt and Nubia. It will also contribute to the development of comparative studies of ancient languages and the establishment of universal rules on linguistic change in the evolution of languages.
The methodological approach applied to the study of the selected texts and the results of the research will be published in scientific works.
Nile in Contact, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education under the Beatriz Galindo Programme, is a four-year project launched at the beginning of July 2023 at the University of Jaén that operates in collaboration with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
