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Journal of Historical Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Exploring diachronic variation in discernment politeness in Ancient Egyptian

ORCID logo | University of East Anglia
| Harvard University
In this paper, we investigate evidence of diachronic variation in patterns of Discernment Politeness in letters written in the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom (c. 2300–2200 bce) and Late Ramesside period (c. 1099–1069 bce). We present examples of requests, information acts and honorifics used in these letters, predominantly those letters sent by subordinates to their superiors, to explore how this relationship dynamic is linguistically indexed. Our evidence shows that throughout the Old and New Kingdoms, communicative acts were regulated by behavioural norms dependent on power structures rather than individual volition, with Power being the most dominant social variable. Finally, we argue that Discernment is a key approach for exploring politeness in texts from ancient Egypt, supporting current research on the topic, and that the approach used here for the ancient Egyptian material has wider applicability for diachronic linguistic analyses of remote civilisations which are highly hierarchical.
Keywords: Ancient Egypt, discernment, honorifics, information acts, letters, power, requests
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discernment Politeness: A theoretical overview
  • 3.Diachronic variation in discernment politeness
    • 3.1Request acts
    • 3.2Information acts
    • 3.3Honorifics
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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