3 Putting Intentions in Their Place: Materialising Meaning through Spatial Dynamics in Appeals to the Dead
In: Variability in the Earlier Egyptian Mortuary TextsSearch for other papers by Angela McDonald in
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Abstract
Within the genre that comprises written Appeals to the Dead (known traditionally, and much too restrictively, as Letters to the Dead), much variation is to be seen. It is present in unusual orthographies of individual words, tailored through idiosyncratic determinatives and in directional manipulations enacted at the level of signs, but also manifest across entire texts that can be shaped by the intentions of the writer, often working sympathetically with a medium of an equally unusual nature. After a brief discussion of how the corpus should be defined and what terms we might usefully use, this paper explores the semantic implications of the placement of written content, specifically the spatial orientation of signs, words, and texts as a whole, and considers the reasons behind materialising meaning in this way.