Textcorpus und Worterbuch: Aspekte zur agyptischen Lexikographie.

• Author: Depuydt, Leo
• Position: Review

Textcorpus und Worterbuch: Aspekte zur agyptischen Lexikographie. Edited by STEFAN GRUNERT and INOELORE HAFEMANN. Probleme der Agyptologie, vol. 14. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1999. Pp. xlv + 406. HR 165, $97.50.

These are the twenty-seven papers presented at a conference held in September 1997 in Berlin on the occasion of the new beginning (from 1994 onward) of organized team-work on Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian vocabulary at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy. A committee appointed by the Academy supervises the project. Several reports on similar efforts taking place elsewhere are also included. There was reason for celebration in 1997. In 1897, work began at Berlin on the Egyptian Dictionary, known to Egyptologists simply and affectionately as the Worterbuch. The dictionary took decades to complete, under the editorship of the eminent Berlin Egyptologists A. Erman and H. Grapow, helped by dozens of scholars from many countries. Some of the papers here are reminiscences on the lexicographical work done in Berlin during the second half of the last century. W. Westendorf describes the situtation from the end of World War II to the completion of the Worterbuch in 1953. W. F Reineke chronicles subsequent efforts in East Berlin, aiming at a second edition of the dictionary. It is good to have these accounts from key Witnesses.

The reunification of Germany infused new life into the dictionary project. A founding conference was held in Berlin in September 1992. Even if the aforementioned committee ostensibly serves the purpose of "re-editing" the Worterbuch, and even if much disagreement exists among those involved on just about every aspect of the project, all agree that producing a new Egyptian dictionary is not feasible within the next few decades. There is even a sense that producing a new dictionary does not need to be the aim of the Berlin project. The Internet may have changed forever the nature of large-scale lexicographical efforts--in ways that often defy prognosis. At the heart of a traditional Egyptian dictionary lie myriads of tiny discrete judgments about countless passages of Egyptian literature by philologically discerning minds. Students of Egyptian know how much time can go into discussing a single word in a single passage. The fact that hieroglyphic writing only imperfectly represents the Egyptian language account s for much of the difficulty. But the emphasis of the present dictionary project is not, in the first place, on...