Deixis and Frames of Reference: Strategies of Perspectivation in Language, Text, and Image

Dissertations

• (C-1-X-1) Imaginary Realia of the Netherworld: Multimodal Display and Production of Knowledge in the Amduat

  The “Book of the Hidden Chamber”, generally known as Amduat, is the earliest attested Egyptian cosmography of the Hereafter. Painted on the walls of the burial chamber of New Kingdom royal tombs in Thebes during the first phase of its attestation (15-14th century BC), it displays the journey of the Sun God Re through the Netherworld during the twelve hours of the night, culminating in his rebirth every morning in the east. The Amduat is a thoroughly illustrated book whose pictures and texts constitute a fixed, inseparable unity. The interplay of images and texts in this book was not only a means to store and pass down existing cosmographic knowledge but also played a significant role in the process of knowledge generation.

• (C-1-X-10) Prosopographia Memphitica. Individual Identities and Collective Biographies from a Royal Residence of the New Kingdom

  By evaluating and comparing all prosopographic data of a person’s social environment, the aim of this Ph.D. research project is not only to shed light on the identity of the individual but especially on the reconstruction of social interrelations within a whole network of persons. The Social Network Analysis (SNA) forms the methodological framework.

• (C-1-X-2) Perceptive verbs and concepts of the netherworld in Ancient Egyptian funerary texts

  Every language and culture has its own way of speaking of perception. This Ph.D. project concentrates on the syntax and semantics of perception verbs in Hieroglyphic Egyptian. The lexicalization patterns of verbs of the five sensory modalities of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste are being studied against the background of methods and theories coming from the field of Cognitive Linguistics and Lexical Semantics.

• (C-1-X-4) Perspektivierungen im Altnubischen - Ausdrücke des Raumes und der Zeit in übersetzungsnubischen Bibeltexten

  This Ph.D. project aims at gaining new insight into medieval-Christian Nubia by focusing on its literary tradition. At its centre are expressions of spatial and temporal perspectivation in Old Nubian biblical texts, especially postpositional expressions which are equivalent to prepositions in e.g. Indo-Germanic languages.

• (C-1-X-5) Persuading the Divine: On the Composition of Hittite Prayers

  This Ph.D. thesis investigated the composition and rhetoric of Hittite prayers. Different aspects of how speech is used in prayers to direct the attention of the addressed deity in such a way that he/she will grant the presented requests were examined. A special focus was on the different textual elements that can be identified in the prayers, their organisation and function within the texts, and the use of older prayers to compose new ones.

• (C-1-X-6) Reception of Egyptian Hieroglyphs: The Arabic perspective between transmission of knowledge and reuse

  This Ph.D. project analyses the interpretations and reuses of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the medieval Arabic context, based on unpublished manuscripts dating from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries CE. The focus is on the genre of so-called alphabet books which sometimes include extensive lists with hieroglyphic characters. Furthermore, hieroglyphs appear in the broader context of occult literature. While the European reception of hieroglyphs has been widely analyzed, this project aims at presenting the respective Arabic perspective.

• (C-1-X-7) Comunicative strategies in new contexts: from verse inscriptions to literary epigrams

  This Ph.D. project focuses on dedicatory epigrams from the Hellenistic era. The work follows the most recent exegetic line in studies on epigrammatic poetry which acknowledges the important relationship between Hellenistic ‘literary’ epigrams and epigraphic poetry. For this reason, inscribed and ‘literary’ examples are considered together. In particular, the analysis focuses on the use of deictic expressions in dedicatory epigrams, i.e. on the use of all those linguistic elements whose meaning and interpretation depend on the spatial and temporal context where they are uttered.

• (C-1-X-8) Comical Space. Communication and Interaction on Vases from Southern Italy

  This Ph.D. project offers a new, detailed analysis of the iconography of the so-called “phlyax”-vases from the 4th century BC. Due to an emphasis on pictorial elements of interaction and communication within the images – especially gesture and body language – the project moved away from static typologies of masks or role-types to an image-specific construction of human interactions and social hierarchies.

• (C-1-X-9) Translation practices and techniques in the Hittite Empire

  This Ph.D. project aims at demonstrating how the scribes in the Hittite empire dealt with foreign languages through the activity of translation and to investigate what role these translated texts could have played. The activity from the neighboring Mesopotamian culture is more widely known; however, the scribes in the Hittite empire, who worked with so many languages in ancient times very intensively, have not been fairly valued yet.