[skip to content]

Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS)

Hany Rashwan

BA (Helwan University, Cairo), MA in Ancient Egyptian Language (Helwan University, Cairo)

Overview

Hany Rashwan
Name:
Hany Rashwan
Email address:
Thesis title:
Working title: The question of the literary in approaches to Ancient Egyptian Literature: towards an Arabic-based critical approach " the debate between a man and his soul (BA) as a case study"
Year of Study:
2010/2011
Internal Supervisors

External Supervisors

Dr Stephen Quirke

PhD Research

In more than century since the first anthologies of Ancient Egyptian literature, generations of European and Euroamerican Egyptologists have investigated Ancient Egyptian literary compositions from many different perspectives including European literary analytical methods.

We have to confess that the European philology has made remarkable progress in Ancient Egyptian linguistic-literary research. In this contrast, as other orientalist philologists remarked, Egyptology suffers from a solid Eurocentrism, with a political partisanship cloaked by the claim of academic political innocence. Egyptologists seem inescapably trapped in the European spirit, imposed unwittingly on the ancient written sources, and tend to lose sight of the special character of the Egyptian language and its literature as a part of Afro-Asiatic languages family.

For example, metric studies, or discussions of the prose/verse distinction, invariably reflect the native language of the particular scholar, whether German, French, or English. As a result, several leading western scholars concluded that western literary theory cannot resolve issues of Ancient Egyptian literary styles, or metric studies.

Nevertheless, the dominant Egyptological focus remains European, as we find also many studies showing the Ancient Egyptian influence on European literatures, from ancient Greek to modern German and English. Alongside, European Biblical interests have encouraged comparative literary and religious study of Hebrew and Ancient Egyptian sources, even we find two PhD comparing the Song of Songs with the Ancient Egyptian love songs.

Such comparative literary studies make it all the more extraordinary that no one investigates the closer connections with Arabic literature, linguistically and geographically closer than western European reception can be.

My study in the PhD follows five years of research on Ancient Egyptian poetry and its metric, ending with my MA, in which I combined advances in European Egyptology with advantages of Arabic literary perspectives and language, including Egyptian colloquial.

I am now in a position to focus on the Arabic critical and rhetorical theories and the working out of a viable comparative method, testing them on the Ancient Egyptian poems while engaging the traditions of European philological approaches.

PhD Publications

  • (Forthcoming) Book: The Ancient Egyptian Poetry and its Metric, The Supreme Council of Culture of Egypt, Cairo (in Arabic)