Metaphors of sensory experience in ancient Egyptian texts: emotion, personality, and social interaction

Chantrain, Gaelle [UCL] Camilla Di Biase-Dyson [Macquarie University]

The goal of this chapter is to describe how emotional states and personal characteristics are described in terms of sensory experience in ancient Egyptian texts.We consider specifically the processing of human emotion and temperament and we show that these features are depicted in ancient Egyptian texts with reference to a wide range of sensory phenomena, particularly external impulses like temperatures, textures, colours and shades, sounds, tastes, and smells. Many such metaphorical and metonymic transfers are cross- linguistically well attested,2 perhaps because they share a metonymic basis, namely, that an emo- tional state and the physical instantiation of that state—be it a sensation within the body (like temperature) or one outside the body (like colours, smells, tastes, and textures, as well as the gen- eral environment)—are contiguous, and dependent on each other