Thought Couplets in The Tale of Sinuhe: Verse Text and Translation with an Outline of Grammatical Forms and Clause Sequences and an Essay on the Tale as Literature.

• Author: Bleiberg, Edward

This study of Sinuhe contains five sections. There is a hieroglyphic verse text which establishes the normative division into lines of poetry, a literal translation, a list of grammatical forms and clause sequences found in the text, a series of charts which show the distribution into initial and non-initial clauses of the grammatical forms, and an essay on the narrative as a work of literature. All of this will be useful to scholars who want to study Sinuhe as a work of literature.

This book comes to press at a time when serious disagreements among scholars remain about the basic components of an Egyptian sentence. Foster's contribution to this debate comes from his distinctly literary perspective on questions of what constitutes a complete thought, and therefore a sentence, in Middle Egyptian. Scholars will also benefit from the almost overwhelming number of empirical data that he has tabulated from Sinuhe. No matter which of the current views one takes of the nature of the Middle Egyptian verbal system, the charts and tables that Foster has compiled will be an important resource in the argument. His observations about the differences between...