Perceptions of Meteorological Phenomena in Ancient Egypt: Textual Database

This database was created as part of the research for a doctoral dissertation titled "Perceptions of Meteorological Phenomena in Ancient Egypt", undertaken at the University of Oxford.  The database provides textual attestations for weather words in ancient Egyptian. The xls spreadsheet is a simplified version of the sqlite database. A list of abbreviations used and a full bibliography is provided in the pdf document.   Dissertation Abstract: Perception of landscape has become crucial for how we recreate ancient experience, linking landscape to concepts of embodiment, identity, and dwelling, but the perception of weather has been absent from these discussions. While historical climatology has reconstructed past climates using quantitative methods, limited research has been done on the impact of weather phenomena, both mundane and extraordinary, on cultural experience and expression. This dissertation applies landscape theory to the weather of ancient Egypt, studying how ancient Egyptians perceived, conceptualised, and interacted with their weather, through archaeological, representational, and textual sources.  The first chapter discusses the anthropological approach to weather as part of a culture’s landscape, which forms the theoretical backbone of this dissertation. The following chapter provides an outline of Egyptian climate and weather patterns, creating a baseline from which to build when discussing ancient perception and conceptualisation. My aim is not to reconstruct the palaeoclimate, but to define the meteoric possibilities. The third chapter examines the archaeological and representation evidence for engagement with the weather, whilst the fourth chapter explores the lexicon of weather, refining our understanding of these terms by adding nuance. Finally, the discussion brings together all the evidence in order to appraise the perception of weather in ancient Egypt holistically. The dissertation has a broad scope, considering evidence from the Old Kingdom to the end of the New Kingdom, in order to maximise the potential of the fragmentary evidence. These varied sources indicate the practical, religious, and cultural relationships the Egyptians had with their weather: they built structures to both utilise and mitigate against weather, incorporated weather into cosmogonies and their conceptualisation of the ongoing maintenance of the universe, and used weather terminology in metaphorical language, among other aspects. I argue that the Egyptians were deeply entwined with their weather, just as they were with the rest of their landscape.