Syntactic and Lexico-Semantic Aspects of the Legal Register in Ramesside Royal Decrees.

• Author: Jay, Jacqueline E.

Syntactic and Lexico-Semantic Aspects of the Legal Register in Ramesside Royal Decrees. By ARLETTE DAVID. Gottinger Orientforschungen, IV Series--Egypt, vol. 38. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2006. Pp. vii + 313 [euro] 78 (paper).

This book is the fifth in the GOF IV series to examine how hieroglyphic "determinatives" (or "script classifiers") reflect the way the ancient Egyptians classified and categorized the elements of their world. The bulk of the book is a section-by-section transliteration, translation, and analysis of the Ramesside royal decrees, divided into four generic subsets: 1) specific protection/criminal law decrees (e.g., the Nauri decree) issued to protect the personnel and property of a temple; 2) specific endowment decrees, very short texts in which the king decreed the establishment of a defined endowment; 3) specific commission decrees, even shorter texts stating something that the king commanded to be done; 4) epistolary warning and instruction decrees, personal letters addressed by the king to a royal officer (P. Anastasi IV 10.8-11.8), a priest (P. Cairo ESP [B]), or the viceroy of Nubia (P. Turin 1896 ro). Each text is divided into sections based on function (e.g., the "enacting clause," which names the issuer of the decree, its object, its beneficiary, and its applicability), and the analysis of each section of text identifies a set list of features: Neo-Egyptian characteristics (Late Egyptian), "Classical" forms (Middle Egyptian), legal terms, and legal formulae. Ultimately, David concludes that the mixed language of the Ramesside decrees may reflect the character of the law in general, which, although theoretically accessible to everyone, has its own distinct culture.

As outlined in the introduction, David draws on a number of schools of thought to establish her methodology. Her syntactic analyses follow the Polotskian structuralist textual-analytic approach, some of the more distinctive terms of which are theme (the "given" or "presupposed" information), rheme (the message about that information), and nexus (the link between the two). When discussing the use of language, David uses terms first borrowed from socio-linguistics into Egyptology by Goldwasser. The key term "register" is defined as a "variety of language distinguished according to use," of which the crucial criteria "are found in its grammar and lexis" (p. 10). She identifies the language phase of different grammatical constructions used in the...