Phonological Variants of the Old Egyptian Particle sk/sT in the Biographies of Wnj

Abstract

In 2012, excavations by the French Archaeological Mission at Saqqara uncovered several blocks bearing an inscription with remarkable parallels to the well-known biography of the Sixth Dynasty official Wnj from Abydos. These parallels led Philippe Collombert to identify the owner of the Saqqara blocks, named Nfr-wn-Mrjj-Ro, with the aforementioned Wnj. Despite their strong parallels, the two versions of the same text show a slight but interesting difference: the subordinating particle is written sk in the Saqqara version but sT in the Abydos version. These two texts then can form the core of a case study to examine these particular phonological variants in Old Egyptian texts. In this article, I will provide a brief overview of the ⟨k⟩ > ⟨T⟩ phonological change of Early Egyptian, and then discuss other attestations of the particle sk/sT to attempt to illuminate the linguistic context for this particular change in the texts of Wnj. Finally, I will suggest a possible explanation for this change, with the linguistic analysis informed by the historical and textual background of both texts – that of an official moving his tomb away from the Capital Zone and adopting a non-Capital Zone socio-dialect in the process. The investigation of this particular sound change illustrates some of the (not insurmountable) challenges of historical linguistic studies of Old Egyptian.