What it means to be ‘sad’ in ancient Egypt. A lexical semantic and lexicographic study of ancient Egyptian lemmata attributed to the ‘sadness’ ‘lexical field’

This thesis assesses whether the meanings of emotion words found in dictionaries of the ancient Egyptian language are ‘fit for purpose’ to study Egyptian emotions. It is natural that Egyptological emotion research should make use (explicitly nor not) of ancient Egyptian dictionaries, given that their system of lemmata and the glosses supplied to those lemmata seem to fit ‘basic’ emotion categories, like ‘anger’, ‘fear’ and ‘sadness’. Considering the close connection between dictionaries and emotion research, it is necessary to interrogate why and how dictionaries are made, as well as the categories they create. Such critical reflection is essential in light of compelling findings from emotion research. Not only has the universality of ‘basic’ emotions like ‘fear’ and ‘sadness’ been challenged, but cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that emotion words are variable and rarely have exact equivalents across languages. Consequently, modern glosses, like ‘sadness’, that are provided for Egyptian lemmata in dictionaries may not be as ‘equivalent’ to their Egyptian counterparts as traditionally thought. Contending that such partial equivalences offer a tenuous basis for studying Egyptian emotions, this thesis proposes a method by which Egyptian emotion lexemes can be studied in a methodical and theoretically informed way that mitigates anachronism by questioning the existence of universalist emotion categories in the first place. To do so, it constructs a hypothetical ‘sadness’ ‘lexical field’, comprising lemmata that the dictionaries have attributed to this category. Via lexical semantic approaches, it interrogates the real properties of the lexemes in a lexicographic perspective. It demonstrates that the alleged ‘sadness’ lexemes are poor candidates for ‘equivalents’ of this emotion, and thus the category of ‘sadness’, based on these members, dissolves. This complete reappraisal, situated within the History of Emotions framework, invites critical reflection on the nature of emotion categories across historical and cultural contexts.