This study of the Late Egyptian literary work, The Contendings between the Body and the Head, presents a new edition of the Turin writing tablet CGT 58004. Having visualised recent photos of the tablet with DStretch, a new transcription of the text can be presented, along with a new translation. A textual analysis, moreover, reveals the highly playful and metaphorical nature of the language, whereby the feminine body paints a vivid picture of her roles and responsibilities in order to challenge the primacy of the masculine head.
This paper unpacks the cognitive processes potentially involved in comprehending funerary ‘models’ from ancient Egypt. These objects comprise small scenes, usually made of wood, which have been found in burial chambers of pharaonic-era tombs. After considering the fittingness of the term ‘model’, the paper illustrates how a cognitive approach might better help us understand the purported functionality of these objects than has hitherto been the case. This approach, grounded in distributed cognition, draws on semiotics, figurative thought and communication theory and considers the priorities of both the theoretical sender and the theoretical receiver. The perspective of the sender comprises what could actually be built, given the confines of material, size, space and budget. The perspective of the receiver is tied to the factors that guarantee intelligibility, such as cultural primaries, medial awareness and aesthetic priming. It is argued that many of the cognitive processes driving comprehension may be based on transfer processes transcending culture and aesthetics, such as metonymy and metaphor, which occur both in the linguistic and the visual modality. In this way, we can ground discussions of model production and use in more fine-grained theoretical and methodological frameworks and achieve new insights into the communicative power of these objects.
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