Travel in Space and Time: between concrete realities and mental repre-sentations in Ancient Egypt

How did the ancient Egyptians perceive the notion of travel? What kind of mental representation did they make of it? How did they describe it? I here propose a lexical approach to the thematic of travel, based on recurrent lexemes and locutions associated to it. The study will focus on texts from the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, and consider several parameters: the complete cotextual environment, the aspectual tenses, the chronological distribution and the distribution by genre. I will also take into account the use of the semantic classifiers as possible witnesses of the relations between space and time. This study is thus consistent with the Time is Space Hypothesis in general linguistics, especially in the cognitive models. Interferences between space and time can be traced in the language, in the aspectual-temporal system, of course, but also in the lexicon. In this respect, the study of phraseology and metaphors seems to be particularly rewarding as they open an interesting window to the ancient Egyptians’ mental representations. This study, which takes as its starting point the literary motive of travel, could later expand to some other still unexplored quarters of the mental spaces of the ancient Egyptians.