(Im)politeness, irony and hierarchical status: pragmatic anchorage of the Ancient Egyptian fictional narrative

Chantrain, Gaelle
(2026) (Im)politeness in ancient Egypt: norms, wit, and rudeness in texts from pharaonic times through late antiquity — ISBN: [978-90-04-72423-5], 186-219, published

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Mock-politeness (Leech 2014) plays an important role in ancient Egyptian literature. Indeed, it is used consciously as a way to make chosen socio-cultural features salient and to highlight interpersonal behavioural patterns and norms as well as their criticism. (Mock-)politeness and facework (Brown & Levinson 1987) are often used as a constituting part of what shall be called “situational panels”. This notion, developed and introduced here, consists in a didactic-oriented complex sample situation composed of salient elements that the author of the text wants to convey and which can be mentally visualized and/or memorized easily as a whole by the reader. They can be described as “learning capsules”, as composite entities that may contain elements from several language registers and have as purpose to teach definite notions through contextualized learning (e.g. loanwords, diplomacy, geography, etc). They constitute the molecules of the didactic-oriented narrative, a concentrate of contextualised information to remember through the story (e.g. diplomacy elements that the reader will remember after reading Wenamun). These situational panels are often finely linguistically crafted and bear information on multiple layers: grammatical (Uljas 2013), lexical (Kilani 2016), stylistic, intertextual (Garcia & Morales 2021), pragmatico-contextual (e.g. use of mock-politeness [Winand 2004, Chantrain 2022]), politico-cultural (de Spens 1998, Chantrain 2022) and also visual, through the use for example of specific classifiers (e.g. D55 as metaphor marker, Chantrain & Di Biase 2017). In the present contribution, I propose to provide a closer examination of the use of mock-politeness as didactic tool in Middle and Late Egyptian hieratic literary texts and its role in the economy and reception of the literary work, especially narrative texts. Indeed, mock-politeness and facework appear to be central in the construction of impactful situational panels and invites us to question and perhaps even redefine partially the concept and boundaries of didactic literature in Ancient Egypt as well as the socio-pragmatics of teaching and learning. Such panels display a rich and developed dialectic between general cultural frame and pragmatic anchorage and appears to be a shared key component of texts having a didactic/ formative purpose in the broad sense, in other words, going beyond the commonly defined borders of sapiential literature
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Chantrain, G. (2026). (Im)politeness, irony and hierarchical status: pragmatic anchorage of the Ancient Egyptian fictional narrative. In M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Aurore Motte (eds.) (ed.), (Im)politeness in ancient Egypt: norms, wit, and rudeness in texts from pharaonic times through late antiquity (pp. 186-219). Brill. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/232649