A Sociolinguistic Approach to the Ptolemaic Priestly Decrees and the Reconstruction of Past Identities

我的论文集中在托勒密祭司法令上，这是一部关于埃及石碑的行政和政治文献语料库，可以追溯到公元前3世纪和2世纪。这些文献展示了在亚历山大大帝去世后统治国家的托勒密王朝和埃及高级神职人员之间互惠互利的荣誉和财政利益交换。它们最显著的特点是，它们是三种语言，用象形文字、通俗和希腊语书写，因此反映了历史时期的多语种、多文化特征。每一个剧本都反映了它的社会影响力。希腊语与外国君主和希腊知识分子有关。象形文字与法老传统有关，由托勒密王朝希望取悦和控制的牧师支持。平民化的人与专业的抄写员和关心日常行政交易和通信的埃及精英进行交流。因此，语料库显示了托勒密国家社会语言的复杂性及其相互理解和再创造的需要。我的目的是彻底调查这些法令的三语性质，揭示它们在表达、信息、语境和受众方面的特殊性。首先，我将建立一个新版本的语料库，并通过详细的文本分析，集中在语言选择、拼写倾向、文体偏好和意译方面的差异和类比，来检查剧本之间的相互作用。通过历时比较这些文件，从第一次到最后一次幸存下来，我将提供三种文字及其语言之间变化的频率和类型的统计显示。然后，我将应用当代的多种语言模型来解释这个数据集。我将特别参考有关书面双语的理论，并采用描述性翻译研究的各个方面，将语言讨论与其社会文化环境联系起来。我的项目将对社会变化对语言的影响提供创新的解释，强调语言流利性的变化和文化融合之间不可或缺的对应关系。这一对过去多种语言使用实例的复杂分析将展示书面资料在代表不同群体的声音和重建混合身份方面的价值。

My thesis centres on the Ptolemaic priestly decrees, a corpus of administrative and political texts on stelae from Egypt, dated to the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. The documents present the mutually advantageous exchange of honours and fiscal benefits between the Ptolemies, ruling the country after the death of Alexander the Great, and the Egyptian high priesthood. Their most distinctive characteristic is that they are trilingual, written in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, and therefore reflect the polyglot, multicultural feature of the historical period. Every script mirrors its social influence. The Greek relates to the foreign monarchs and the Greek intelligentsia. The hieroglyphs connect to the pharaonic tradition, supported by the priests which the Ptolemies looked to please and control. The demotic communicates with professional scribes and elite Egyptians concerned with day-to-day administrative transactions and correspondences. Thus, the corpus displays the sociolinguistic complexity of the Ptolemaic state and its need for reciprocal understanding and reinvention.My aim is to thoroughly investigate the trilingual nature of these decrees, bringing out their distinctness in expression, message, contextualisation, and audience. Firstly, I will establish a new edition of the corpus and examine the interplay between the scripts, via a detailed textual analysis centred on discrepancies and analogies in linguistic choices, orthographic tendencies, stylistic preferences, and free translations. Through a diachronic comparison of the documents, from their first to last surviving instance, I will provide a statistical display of the frequency and typology of variations across the three scripts and their languages. I will then apply contemporary models of multilingualism to interpret this dataset. I will specifically refer to theories on written bilingualism and adopt aspects of 'descriptive translation studies' to link the linguistic discussion to its sociocultural environment. My project will offer an innovative interpretation of the impact of societal change on language, highlighting the indispensable correspondences between changes in language fluency and cultural amalgamation. This sophisticated analysis of past instances of multilingualism will demonstrate the value of written sources in representing the voice of heterogeneous populations and reconstructing hybridised identities.