Ignorance and Forgetfulness in Late Egyptian and Classical Egyptian from the New Kingdom until the 26th Dynasty: A Lexical Study

Abstract

The conceptual domain of cognition in Ancient Egyptian is realized linguistically through numerous lexemes and expressions. Following Fortescue, these lexical units can be organized around five pivot-concepts that appear to consistently emerge cross-linguistically and define subdomains within cognition. These subdomains are: knowing, understanding, intending, remembering and thinking, to which a sixth notion attention has here been added. The present study focuses on three verbs with negative meanings in relation to the subdomains knowing and remembering: xm “be ignorant”, smx “forget” and mhj “be forgetful, forget”, as well as the negative constructions neg. + rx “not know”. The aim of this article is to show that the semantics of these lexical units are interconnected with contextual para-synonymy and complementarity relations.