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James Peter Allen

James Peter Allen who was born in 1945, is an American Egyptologist, specializing in language and religion. He was curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1990 up to 2006.

James P. Allen took his PhD from the University of Chicago. Before joining Brown in 2007, Prof. Allen was an epigrapher with the University of Chicago's Epigraphic Survey, Cairo Director of the American Research Center in Cairo (Egypt), and curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is likewise President of the "International Association of Egyptologists".

Prof. Allen's research concerns take ancient Egyptian grammar and literature, religious belief, and history. He has wrote extensively on these issues, taking Genesis in Egypt: the Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (Yale, 1988), Middle Egyptian: an Foundation to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, The Heqanakht Papyri, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), The Study between a Man and His Soul, and The Ancient Egyptian Language, an Historical Study (Cambridge, 2013). He is currently working on issue of corporate from the Metropolitan Museum's digs at Dahshur and on a general grammar of the ancient Egyptian Texts of the Pyramids.

The essential thrust of my explore since 2010 has been on the verbal system of Earlier (Old and Middle) Egyptian. Previous examples of the language have proven either away or overly mechanical in excusing the formal, semantic, and syntactic features of a number of verb forms. As a leave, I and a number of my colleagues in Europe have begun to afterthought our approach to the data. My contribution since 2010 has been to discover the phenomenon of duplication (consonant doubling) as a lexical own rather than an inflectional one, to concentrate the armory of a primary verb form (the sḏm.f)  from six forms to two in Old Egyptian (unmarked and marked, the latter expressing incompletion) and only one in Middle Egyptian, to re-analyze the exercise of two verb forms (the sḏm.f and sḏm.n.f) in relative articles as a have of syntax rather than modulation, and to re-analyze the so-called emphatic construction (in which the verb is thematic rather than rhematic) as conditioned by context rather than by inflection or syntax.

These all shine my conviction that advance analyses of the Egyptian verbal system (accepting some of my own) have been bought by the unconscious biases that stem from versions into our own languages. For example, the Late Egyptian s?m.f has been studied as concealing two inflected forms, preterite and subjunctive, because its uses want one or the other translation. Both forms, nevertheless, look just the same in writing, and it makes more sense to understand them as reflecting only one inflected form, overlooked for either tense or mood.

For the senior few years I have been working primarily on the Pyramid Texts, the oldest essential body of ancient Egyptian literature. Most late, I have began work on a super grammar of the Pyramid Texts, which does not yet survive. To that end, I recently collected a new concordance of all released authors from the Old Kingdom, a six-volume work that has been made freely available online, and the first volume of my grammar, devoted to the greyest Pyramid Texts, those of Unis (Dyn. V, ca. 2323 BC), will come along in Eisenbrauns Languages of the Ancient Near East series in 2016.

Publications:


The Inflection of the Verb in the Pyramid Texts (Malibu: Undena, 1984)

Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge: University Press, 2000)

The Heqanakht papyri. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002)

The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006)

The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005)

The Egyptian Coffin Texts, Vol. 8. Middle Kingdom Copies of Pyramid Texts (Chicago: University Press, 2006)

"The Amarna Succession" in Causing His Name to Live: Studies in Egyptian Epigraphy and History in Memory of William J. Murnane, University of Memphis, 2007

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs 2nd ed. (Cambridge: University Press, 2010)

The Debate between a Man and His Soul, a Masterpiece of Ancient Egyptian Literature (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 44; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011)

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