Stockholm university
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Åke Engsheden

About me

I am a reader in Egyptology and leading Swedish expert on ancient Egyptian in all its varieties. A diachronic perspective was important for me already when writing my thesis on the verbal system in the high-status variety of ancient Egyptian in late pharaonic Egypt, as it has been also later in my research on Egyptian toponymy. I have taught Egyptology both in Sweden and abroad (Finland, China and Germany). Since 2016 I have been teaching much-appreciated courses related to ancient Egypt here at Stockholm University.

Research

As a researcher I focus on texts and grammar in ancient Egyptian and Coptic. In my thesis “La reconstitution du verbe en égyptien de tradition 400-30 av. J.-C.” (published in 2003) I analysed the high-status variety of ancient Egyptian which had been neglected in older research. In later years I have published several works on Egyptian toponymy, including a modern regional study which is based on field research in the Nile delta. My last monograph is an index of toponyms that are mentioned in Coptic documentary texts from Late Antiquity. I have also been the PI of an infrastructural project sponsored by Riksbankens jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden) regarding Coptic ostraca (inscribed limestone or pottery sherds) found in Swedish public collections. These texts provide information regarding life, mainly in a monastic environment, in the 7th-8th centuries AD in Thebes in Southern Egypt. Next to this, I write for a wide audience, including a catalogue on the occasion of an exhibition on hieroglyphs at Uppsala University Library in 2022-3, and I have participated also in other museum work. I also participate in Thoth, a international project (Liege/Berlin) devoted to the inventory and development of the hieroglyphs.

 

Key words

Hieroglyphs, Egyptology, Coptic, Late Antiquity, Toponymy
 

Brief CV

2014-15 Visiting professor in Egyptology at NENU (Changchun, People’s Republic of China)
2011-12 Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz
2006-08 Membre à titre étranger at IFAO, Cairo (Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale)
2006-2013 Researcher at Uppsala University
2002 PhD at Uppsala University (Egyptology)

Studies in Uppsala, Copenhagen and Cologne

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Everything Is Not What It Seems: A New Examination of a Purported Naos Fragment from the 4th Century BCE in Verona

    2023. Åke Engsheden. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 38 & 39, 117-126

    Article

    The author makes three observations about a purported naos fragment from the 4th century BCE, now in the Museo Archeologico in Verona. First, he refutes the long-held assumption that it represents a naos. Second, he observes that the cartouche on its front face does not belong to Nectanebo I. Third, he argues that its original location might have been in the Temple of the Escarpment at Saqqara, and perhaps within the precinct commonly called the Bubastieion, noting that there are no certain attestations of the name ‘Bubastieion’ in ancient texts.

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  • Towards a List of Place Names in Coptic

    2023. Åke Engsheden. Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, 123-141

    Conference

    This is a report on a project aiming to create a list of place names from Coptic textual sources.After an overview of the history of research concerning Coptic place names, I describe mymethod and the material on which the list is based. So far it consists mainly of attestationsthat have been extracted from the indexes of text editions of documentary texts. The relevantbibliography has been compiled by consulting the “Checklist of Editions” used in papyrologicalstudies. Attestations from literary texts will hopefully be added later. I discuss also how bestto alphabetize Coptic place names and argue for the use of an alphabetical order instead of theconsonantal sorting order which is normally used in modern Coptic dictionaries. A samplepage from the name list is provided. Finally, I suggest that a synchronic point of view shouldbe taken in the subsequent onomastic analysis which is based on the list resulting from thisproject.

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  • Traditional Egyptian II (Ptolemaic, Roman)

    2016. Åke Engsheden. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 1-10

    Chapter

    From 404 BCE - 394 CE hieroglyphic texts were in general composed in the high-status language variety termed Traditional Egyptian. This was used exclusively in religious and sacerdotal contexts and is as such opposed to Demotic, which served both as a spoken and as a written language. Traditional Egyptian is a reflex of how the late scribes perceived the classical language. The result is a morphologically impoverished Egyptian (in comparison with the classical language), in combination with a phonology that corresponds largely to Demotic. Traditional Egyptian served as a vehicle for many new compositions, in particular religious inscriptions in temples and on papyri, but also funerary, historical, and autobiographical texts. Meanwhile, older texts in the classical language continued to be copied: as long as there are no reliable means of dating texts according to linguistic criteria, it remains difficult to establish the exact corpus of texts written in Traditional Egyptian.

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