2012. On (Mis)conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt

LingAeg 20 (20 I2), 165- I 84 On (Mis )conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt Rune Nyord, Cambridge Abstract A recent review in this joumal of my book Breathing Flesh provides the point of departure for a discussion of the possibility of approaching questions of conceptions of the body in ancient Egypt drawing on conceptual frameworks derived from outside the field of Egyptology. Along the way, this contribution also touches upon broader questions of the ideal nature ofconstmctive scholarly debate, especially when dealing with attempts to offer new interdisciplinary perspectives on heavily entrenched traditional EgyptologicaJ positions. David Warburton's recent review) of my 2009 book Breathing Flesh (Nyord 2009a) offers a welcome opportunity to address some possible misunderstandings of the theory and method introduced in that volume in an effort to make the difficult question of conceptions of the body in an ancient cu lture accessible to scho larly analysis. It should be noted from the outset that it is almost inevitable that my remarks will come off as a criticism targeted directly at Warburton, which is unfortunate. In fact, I have the utmost admiration for Warburton's willingness to offer his thoughts on books and topics outside of his own specialization,2 and certainly I would be happy to see more colleagues engage more broadly, to keep the wider impl ications of special ist studies in sight as well as maintaining an inclusive discussion. For this to work, however, it is necessary for the reviewer to take the time to understand the author's perspective and follow all the arguments in their entirety. Without this kind of openness, reviews tend to become duelling worldviews rather than constructive interaction. Surely a productive meeting of minds is the common aim. I hope to make a contribution to that goal with the present article. Breathing Flesh is, admittedly, a demanding book. It draws on several fields outside of Egyptology, while interweaving traditional philology with a method as yet untried in either Egypto logy or neighbouring fields. Part of the book's difficulty is found in the traditional chapter on "Theory and Method" which deals almost exclusively with literature from outside the field of Egyptology. A busy Egyptological reader is understandably tempted to read this chapter rather cursorily or even skip 2 Warburton (20 11). Page numbers in the present article without a preceding bibl iographic reference refer to this review. Warburton has been enlisted to review an impressive range of topics in Lingua Aegyptia lately. The review most immediately comparable to the one under discussion here is probably that of Paul John Frandsen' s book Incestuous and Close-Kin Marriage in Ancient Egypt and Persia: An Examination of the Evidence, Copenhagen 2009 (Warburton 20 I0). Apart from the similarities in tone and contents of the reviews, it may be noted that both books, other than being outside of Warburton's areas of expertise as evidenced by scholarly publications, are authored by fomler Copenhagen colleagues of Warburton ' s, and have appeared in the CN I Publications monograph series published by Museum TuscuJal1um. 166 Rune Nyord parts of it altogether. Although this may be an adequate strategy for some books, as Warburton's review demonstrates, in the case of Breathing Flesh such an approach can lead to a fundamentally flawed comprehension of the theory and method of the work. This not only severely hampers the reader's understanding of the work, but also, consequently, his or her ability to engage with its contents in a fruitful manner. One of the most fundamental questions that Breathing Flesh seeks to address is how to study ancient conceptions of the body on the basis of textual sources, and how and why this problem differs from other lexicographical questions. The traditional lexicographic approach to ancient Egyptian body part terminology can be illustrated by J.H. Walker's monograph Studies in Ancient Egyptian Anatomical Terminology (1996) where the main problem is identified as establishing a set of correspondences between the terminology of modern anatomy and ancient designations of body parts. This work (and others in the same school of thought) proceeds from the assumption that there is an Egyptian semantic field corresponding to that of modern medical anatomy, so that the understanding of individual lexemes becomes a matter of determining where the delineations between terms are to be drawn . On the face of it, this seems like a perfectly sensible approach , which of course accounts for its popularity, not only in traditional Egyptology, but equally in the research history of a wide range of other cultural studies. After all, this is the way a philologist would approach most other conceptual domains dealing with "concrete" objects, be they tools, fauna or other parts of the world. 3 However, there are certain clues that the body and its parts may also be part of a conceptual world where, despite widespread Egyptian practices of butchery and mummification, modern anatomical correlations need to be augmented by considerations of more immediate experiences of the human body in a given culture. A seemingly contradictory position providing the beginning of an Egyptological delineation of this question is found in a quote from A.H. Gardiner (1956: 4, emphasis in original): The most strikin g feature of Egyptian in all its stages is its concrete realism , its preoccupation with exterior objects and occurrences to the neglect of those more subjective distinctions which play so prominent a part in modem, and even in the classical , languages. ( .. .) The place taken elsewhere by meditation and a philosophic bent seems with the Egyptians to have been occupied by exceptional powers of observation and keenness of vision. Intellectual and emotional qualities were ordinarily described by reference to the phys ical gestures or expressions by which they we re accompanied, thus 'Iiberality' is 'extension of hand ' (3wt-,), ' cleverness' is 'sharpness of face (sight)" Ｈｓｰ､ＭｾｲＩＮ＠ While the uniqueness ascribed by Gardiner to the Egyptian perspective might be somewhat overstated the observation about the " metaphoric" use of body parts in Egyptian is both interesting and potentially highly relevant for the question at hand. If 3 Weeks ( 1979: 73) speaks in this regard of identifYing the "attribute-c1usters" characterising each Egyptian term (also quoted at Nyord 2009a: 44t). On (Mis)conceptionsofthe Body in Ancient Egypt 167 Gardiner is right, it would seem that in the Egyptian conceptual system "liberality" would somehow be part of the conceptualisation of "hand" and/or vice versa. The immediate objection that, in a traditional sense, such expressions are " figurative" and thus there is no "real" connection between the concepts in question is problematised by the fact that there simply is no other way to express "liberality" in Egyptian than metaphorically. "Extension of hand" is not, then, an apt description chosen by a particular author to describe something that could be stated more prosaically by using the literal designation - rather, lacking alternatives, it simply is the Egyptian concept of " liberality". Clearly, the notion of " metaphor" is as responsible for the vagueness of this characterisation as is the difficulty of the Egyptian expression. In fact, similar examples from most other languages are readily available. Thus, the problem of how to approach the issue of the concept of the body has two parts: one concerns the special status of the body and its parts in human thought and experience, and the other has to do with understanding the use of metaphor in human language. As will be immediately clear, the nature of both of these questions make their resolution within a narrowly Egyptological framework impossible. Indeed, examples of this overall problem can be found in a number of different fields . For the present purposes, a single example from an early discussion of similar questions relating to Homer' s Greek will suffice. The approach forms part of an exposition of ancient Greek culture by the eminent Danish historian of religion Vilhelm Gmnbech (1942: 58f, my translation): Homer has no thought of showing off; he speaks in a matter-of-fact way of matters of fact. With a sober realism he describes realities, and realities of mental life at that; in hi s level-headed - we might even say prosaic - precision lies the depth of hi s poetry. To him, it as much a mental as a corporal fact for the heart or midriff of a woman to shrink from affront, or for sorrows to thicken and enclose the heart. The midriff relaxes as the eyes grow hazy, the breath pants, and the heart sinks into unconsciousness - thi s is a psychological description of a man fainting on a par with his spirit growi ng warm when he saw his friends again. If we are to appreciate Homer, we will have to give up our aesthetic habit of noting how good an observation it is and how well it has been described, and truly feel the squeezing of the heart and the midriff giv ing way as mental phenomena in just the same way as with the thoughts flashing through the brain. Gmnbech 's solution to the conundrum is thus, crudely put, to make use of the fact that we share a bodily and neural makeup with the ancient Greeks, which makes it possible to not merely understand but in a certain sense even to empathise with the experiences conceptualised in the ancient expressions. This approach is very viable, if somewhat vaguely formulated here. However, it may also be seen that the real problem in the quote lies not so much in the ability to empathise with the ancient Greeks as Gmnbech points out, that may be mainly a matter of habit - but rather in our tendency to separate the world into distinct mental and physical domains, which (apart from other problems it may cause) leaves the body somewhere in between. Although to a Western intuition the body really should belong to the physical world and is often 168 Rune Nyord treated as such, this view, as observed by Gardiner and Gmnbech, leaves very important aspects of the body unaccounted for. Breathing Flesh attempts to solve this problem by employing a dual approach. The broad field of cognitive linguistics 4 contributes the basic idea that linguistic structure reflects conceptual structure, making linguistics a tool with which to study issues of conceptualisation. Among the concepts from this academic tradition that proved useful in Breathing Flesh are conceptual metaphor, image schemata and conceptual blending, some of which are discussed in more detail below.5 Together, the various parts of the cognitive linguistic framework make it possible to get a more precise grasp of the problem identified by Gardiner in the quote above. With the strong coherence between linguistic and conceptual structure in cognitive linguistics, it becomes clear that "liberality" and "hand" can indeed be understood as having a conceptual connection, and the various parts of the cognitive linguistic toolbox make it possible to describe and analyse such connections. The second part of the approach is related more closely to the problem raised by Gmnbech. The ways in which the body can be a "mentar', or better, an experiential phenomenon have been addressed in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. It is central here to understand the "body" as ha ing t\! 0 identities with very different properties, one as an object among others, and the other as a locus of experience - a distinction discussed in more detail below. Drawing inspiration from the works of 20 th and 21 sI century philosophers, Breathing Flesh proposes a conceptual framework that makes it possible to formalise insights like those of Gmnbech in an approach to the body which circumvents the problems in 01 ed in unwieldy constructions like " mental" or "psychological" body parts \ hile at the same time making it possible to analyse the kind of embodied experience Gr0nbech refers to. Rather than repeating what is already a fairly lengthy theoretical discussion in Breathing Flesh itself, I will attempt to identify concrete problems and misunderstandings that are still around three years after the book's pUblication. 6 Warburton 's review offers the perfect opportunity for taking up some of the fundamental points that would appear to be in need of clarification. Thus, rather than largely repeating the structure of Breathing Flesh, perhaps the best way to approach the problem is to look at some of the specific misunderstandings in Warburton's review with comments and references to pertinent sections of the book, as well as to other works that may prove helpful in understanding the problems in question and their suggested solutions. David Warburton's review starts out traditionally by summarising the table of contents. He then moves on to an overview of the theoretical approach developed in the first chapter of the book, and this, unfortunately is where things begin to go wrong. As described above, the underlying theoretical perspective of the book depends on the combination of two rather different interdisciplinary movements: Cognitive linguistics, a broad movement in linguistics that attempts to analyse conceptual structure on the basis of linguistic structure, and phenomenology, a philo- 4 5 6 See the introduction with references in Nyord (2012: 141-147). See also Nyord (2009a: 5-35) for an introduction with further references. For articles further treating this methodology see especially Nyord (2007), (20 I 0) and (20 12). On (Mis)conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt 169 sophical tradition initiated by Edmund Husserl , but drawn on in the book especially in readings of the subsequent developments by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hermann Schmitz. While, as Warburton observes, the parts of cognitive linguistics that deal with classification have played an important role in research on determinatives/graphemic classifiers in the last two decades and will thus be relatively familiar to Egyptian philologists, philosophical phenomenology has only in rare cases informed archaeological studies (an especially noteworthy example is a series of works by Lynn Meskell\ and no previous attempts had been made to benefit from this tradition in philological work. Breathing Flesh thus attempts to combine two, Egyptologically speaking, relatively new perspectives to allow insights into a domain which is very difficult to access with a purely traditional philological method, namely that of the conceptions of the human body in ancient Egypt. Given this state of affairs, the book begins with a quite thorough theoretical and methodological introduction of some 50 pages to introduce not only the various analytical concepts from the two fields but also their broader theoretical context. The first sign that this combined approach is problematic for Warburton is found when he writes "From here he [sc. Nyord] begins to expound on what he understands as the relevant parts of 'phenomenology', primarily based on Lakoff & lohnson and Fauconnier & Turner who tend to stress metaphors" (p. 375). One would in fact be hard pressed to find examples anywhere in the literature where " phenomenology" (with or without Warburton's scare quotes) is used to characterise the works of Lakoff and lohnson (let alone Fauconnier and Turner). Clearly, with a book drawing on several interdisciplinary approaches, it is not in itself damning that a reviewer is not at home in the terminology of the theoretical approaches. [t should be noted however that the book makes a clear distinction between the discussion of metaphor as cognitive expressions (cf. particularly Section 1.1.4-6 for reference to Lakoff and lohnson 's as well as Fauconnier and Turner's work) and the role of phenomenology (Section 1.2), bringing up the question of the thoroughness of the review for anyone who has flicked through the first chapter. In a similar way, the reviewer implies that this chapter presents the works of Lakoff and lohnson on the one hand and Fauconnier and Turner on the other (both belonging to the broad movement of cognitive linguistics) as similar. While one of the most influential works of the Lakoff and lohnson is Metaphors We Live By, one of the main points in the work of Fauconnier and Turner goes beyond the discussion of metaphor and formulates the notion of "conceptual blending" that accounts for a much wider range of phenomena in language and thought. s It quickly becomes apparent that this is much more than just a clumsy conflation on Warburton 's part of ideas best kept distinct, as both the notion of metaphor and the contribution of phenomenology continue to cause problems for his understanding of subsequent parts of the book. 7 8 See especially Meskell & Joyce (2003) and Meskell (2004). See e.g. the explicit contrast between the two theoretical frameworks with further references in Nyord (2007 : 23fn. 73) and the discussion in Nyord (2009a: 23-27). 170 Rune Nyord The first few pages of Warburton 's review form a kind of response to some of the assumptions in the cognitive linguistic framework , with which Warburton appears to disagree vehemently. What is less clear however is on what he bases that disagreement. Apart from a vague reference to Derrida "who demonstrated that when statements are examined they are often found to be meaningless" (p. 375 n. I ),9 the pages do not contain a single reference, and the closest the reader gets to an argument are some intuitive musings on the interrelationship between " language" and "thought". Equally unfortunately, Warburton never gets to a point where he uses his criticism of the theory to draw conclusions about the work under review. This puts the reader in the rather embarrassing position of having to choose between two unattractive alternatives. Either the reviewer is merely expressing a personal opinion with an unclear foundation or he has a sound basis for his views that the reader is left to guess at. Obviously the choice between these two alternatives will be influenced by the perceived authority of the scholar making the statements. As we will see in the discussion below, there is considerable evidence that Warburton 's grasp of the theory and method in question is fairly limited,IO making any attempt at reconstructing an argument in favour of his position a question of overshooting the mark . Thus pending a fuller discussion by Warburton of these issues, it seems safe for the moment to disregard his general opinions on the philosophy of language underlying cognitive linguistic theory - in fact, with the scant material he provides for the discussion of this issue, it is difficult to do anything else. After what thus remains a disappointingly idiosyncratic and unhelpful discussion of the cognitive linguistic part of the theoretical background of the book under review, the summary surprisingly trails off. Having reached page 23 of the book in his summary, Warburton apparently decides that enough ink has been spent on the theory and decides to move on to a section he call s "The Philology". Before we follow him in this move, let us take a look at what happens on the pages he skips. First, the work of Fauconnier and Turner on conceptual blending is introduced. While clearly related in some ways to the work of Lakoff and Johnson, one of the main points, as already As opposed to " LakofT & co. " who '·tend to seek meaning and significance in virtuall y every context" (ibid.). This would appear to rest on a perhaps somewhat skewed understanding of LakofT and Johnson ' s notion of the relationship bet\veen linguistic structure and conceptual structure visa-vis Derrida's famous concept of differance. However. in Warburton' s imprecise formulation and without any reference to the exact detail s of Warburton's reading o f Derrida' s alleged statement, it does not, unfortunately, appear possible to tease out a constructi ve discuss ion from Warburton ' s remarks. 10 Note, apart from the more detailed exanlples discussed below, his suggestion that " [w]e can dismiss the 'm ind-body-dichotomy' problem by suggesting that LakofT & John son have si mpl y mistaken a metaphor for a reality" (p. 376) - a wording which fails to acknowledge a century (or considerabl y more, depending on our precise delineation of the problem) of philosophy and about a handful of decades of cri ti cal theory in the social sciences and hum anities that show that the mind-body problem is of course recognised far beyond the works of LakofT and Johnson, and has proven rather more recalcitrant than Warburton indicates. In fact we need only point out that Warburton himself provides a stellar exampl e of just how ingrained this way of thinking is by proceeding a few lines down on the same page to reinstate another version of mind-body duali sm, when - apparently without even pausing to consider the appropriateness and tenability of the dichotomy - he introduces a di stin ction between " the human mind trained in language" and "the biological neurological way of thought without language". 9 On (Mis)conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt 171 indicated, is the way in which this theory can account for both linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena far beyond that of metaphor. The few times that Warburton mentions Fauconnier and Turner explicitly (e.g. p. 381), it is always in the context of analysing metaphors, so the broader significance of the theory of conceptual blending, as well as its utility in analysing ritual efficacy (Nyord 2009a: 27-30) becomes lost. Then follows a section discussing cultural models - another analytical concept of which Warburton demonstrates only a fairly idiosyncratic understanding." By far the most problematic part to skip, however, is one that is of direct relevance to the methodology in tackling a problem which proves to be of particular interest to Warburton, namely the interpretation of the body part term ib. This is the section on phenomenology of the body as understood in philosophy and anthropology (Nyord 2009a: 3544). This section introduces inter alia the important phenomenological distinction between Leib and Korper. A distinction is made between the body as an object accessib le to the five senses (Korper) and the body as the site of sensations (Leib), or, more programmatically put, the body as sensed versus the body as sensing. In some phenomenological traditions, this is regarded as a clear-cut dichotomy, while in the framework of Hermann Schmitz, on which Breathing Flesh draws, Korper and Leib are regarded rather as opposite poles in a continuum.' 2 In one or another of its philosophical formulations, this basic distinction has been hugely influential in medical anthropology and anthropology of the body, because it offers a conceptual alternative to dominant Western modes of thinking about the body. Thus, previous studies on ancient Egyptian body terminology have tended to treat terms for body parts as a matter of anatomical concepts, in other words as parts of what is known as the Korper. This approach in turn usually entails various notions of "abstract" or "symbolic" body parts as a way to account for cases where terms for body parts are clearly used in ways where they cannot be understood as anatomical 11 The concept is only mentioned in passing in the terminological hodgepodge ofa paragraph towards the end of the review (p. 385f) where Warburton sets out what he would have preferred for the book to be about. Here, he suggests first that one should have "identified the jb as a ' cultural model '" (p. 385) - apparently overlooking that, apart from the purely terminological question about the felicity of claiming an identity between an emic term and a cultural model - this is precisely what is done in chapter 8 of Breathing Flesh. It seems that Warburton's idea is that the notion of an anatomical reference of ib shou ld be abandoned altogether, and this is what he understands as a "cultural model". As will be seen below, this is not in fact far from what is argued in Breathing Flesh, although the conceptual framework developed there avoids the need of the primitive binary dichotomy (anatomical vs. cultural) envisaged by Warburton. Secondly, Warburton suggest that "the ' cultural model ' be abandoned since the phenomenon of the ' heart ' is cross-cultural (as testified by Akkadian and English, etc.)" (p. 386). This idea is not altogether clear, but whereas comparative work could obviously be carried out on the basis of individual "cultural models" (see for instance Berkemer and Rappe 1996), the idea of raising the English term "heart" to the level of a metalinguistic analytical concept, especially while at the same time abandoning the idea of a concrete, bodily reference, seems methodologically highly suspicious. Warburton ' s contention in the same passage (p. 385) that the ascription of "magic" to a cultural model in the book is done "wrongly" is even less comprehensible, but at least it gradually becomes clear that his use of the notion of "cultural model" is quite far from that presented in Breathing Flesh. 12 See the more detailed discussions with references in Nyord (2009a: 39-41) and (2009b: 63-66). 172 Rune Nyord references. 13 The conceptual framework described here (and in greater detail in Breathing Flesh) has brought significant advances in anthropology by acknowledging that people might not always (or even usually) be referring to what we think of as anatomy when talking about their own bodies and, in addition, by making it possible to describe and analyse such expressions. In many such cases we may fruitfully analyse the referent as the "lived body", or Leib, rather than the object of anatomical study, or Korper - crudely put, the " heart" as in "heartburn" (which has nothing to do with the anatomical heart, but happens to make itself felt in that general area) as opposed to " cardiac muscle". To conclude the parallel, a traditional Egyptological approach such as that of Grapow l4 might have deduced that this term shows that English-speakers are unable to distinguish between the heart and oesophagus (the " real" site of the problem identified by the term). Warburton could then reply that they obviously can make the distinction in some contexts, as they are able to perform open heart surgery, so that the only solution seems to be that sometimes "allowances must be made for anatomical imprecision" (p. 379).1 5 As a third position, a phenomenologist with an interest in cultural history like Hermann Schmitz would agree in principle, but would hasten to add that the source of the confusion lies in the assumption that the "heart" in "heartburn" refers to an anatomical entity in the first place. In his view, it refers not to the heart as part of the Korper, i.e. as accessible to the five senses, as Grapow and Warburton both assume without question, but rather to a Leibesinsel located in chest area as part of the lived body. The consequence of this distinction is that in order to analyse such usages, we need a conceptual framework adequate for describing the Leib, rather than simply assuming that the only applicable terminology would derive from modern anatomy (a highly Ko/per-based discipline). Warburton seems to have somehow, presumably on the basis of a very cursory reading, identified the approach in Breathing Flesh with the first of these approaches (exemplified by Grapow), rather than the third (exemplified by Schmitz). As will be seen below, Warburton's lack of appreciation of this methodological point and its implications means that his discussion of the heart terms in the review ends up with just the same problems that Breathing Flesh spends some 70 pages attempting to untangle in chapter 2. Finally, but in some ways most importantly, the last few pages of the theory and method chapter (Nyord 2009a: 44-51) are devoted to the interface between the theoretical framework and the material of the Coffin Texts. Here indications are found about the way in which one can practically proceed when identifying metaphors, image schemata and conceptual blends in the ancient Egyptian texts. Also in this case, 13 Inherently, this practice is perhaps no more problematic than the traditional notion of symbols in other connections. However, when the dichotomy is transferred to Egyptian temls, as is often the case with the ｾｕ ｹ＠ as "concrete/physical heart" and ib as "abstract (etc.) heart" one very quickly reaches a conceptual dead end where nothing further can be said about the structure or function of the Egyptian concepts. 14 Who suggested that the Egyptians possessed insufficient anatomical knowledge to distinguish between the heart and the stomach, cf. the discussion in Nyord 2009a: 58. 15 He further notes that "one can also distinguish between anatomical knowledge, literary metaphors and medical and embalming practice" (p. 378), which of course is true, but doesn't alleviate the need for an adequate conceptual framework. On (Mis)conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt 173 Warburton's subsequent discussion reveals that he has not gone through this section in sufficient detail. Warburton's confused usage of the concept of "phenomenology" at the very beginning of the review seems to indicate that he has simply not read the pages in question. This impression is strengthened by the fundamental problems in his subsequent treatment of two of the main foci in his discussion of the book, namely the meaning of the word ib and his understanding of the role of metaphor in the book's argument. Warburton's fundamental misunderstanding of the methodological move in Breathing Flesh is nowhere more evident than in his attempt to summarise the book ' s conclusions about the meaning of the term ib (p. 377): Ultimately, he [sc. Nyord] seems to take a view seriously thatjb did not really refer to the heart, and in fact that it somehow vaguely referred to what was inside the torso, as the Egyptians allegedly could not distinguish stomach from heart. It is true that distinguishing the Egyptian designations is a philological problem: we cannot be certain that they made the distinctions that we do. However, they were not blind and could see what was in the torso. It is clear that Warburton is making the supposition that ib is a term which most fundamentally designates an organ which can be seen inside the torso. In other words, the term is, as has been the habit in most previous studies, assumed to belong in the conceptual domain of the Kbrper. As will be clear from the remarks above, this is precisely what Breathing Flesh calls into question in the wake of a couple of decades of work in the field of anthropology of the body. It would thus seem, both from the quote cited above and from his subsequent discussion, that Warburton does not consider the possibility that terms for body parts could be understood as anything other than a matter of "anatomy", even after allegedly reading Breathing Flesh from cover to cover. This becomes especially problematic when trying to understand concepts like the ib, which, as demonstrated in chapter 2 of Breathing Flesh, is in fact used predominantly as a part of the "lived body", or Leib, as opposed to the body as accessible to the five senses, or Kbrper - the latter corresponding roughly to the only option that Warburton appears to consider possible.1 6 This lack of consideration for a basic methodological point means that Warburton's discussion contains little that has not already been covered in the previous treatments of the question (and thus discussed at some length in Breathing Flesh), so that pp. 377-379 of the review comes off simply as an attempt to ignore 16 Warburton in fact comes fairly close to narrowing down the problem (but characteristically fails to suggest any solution to it) (p. 379) '"that in Akkadian and Egyptian texts, the heart was not invariably separated from the entrails - but this would not lead any student of anatomy to suggest the Babylonians could not identity a heart and distinguish it ITom other organs'". From the discussion above it will be clear how useful the conceptual ITamework presented in Breathing Flesh would have been as a more precise formulation and an analytical solution to precisely this problem, and thus there is some irony in finding such a lack of appreciation of the contribution by a recent monograph of all places in a review of the same monograph. Such as it is, the quoted passage in fact does a reasonable job summarising the book' s position in vemacular language, although as in a number of similar cases, it appears to be intended by Warburton as a criticism . 174 Rune Nyord Breathing Flesh altogether and thus to avoid engaging with the new methodology presented in that work. Even what the reviewer appears to regard as his trump card, the comparison with Akkadian libbu (p. 379), is not of course new, 17 and while there are certainly promising perspectives yet to explore in this direction, the Akkadian (and Hebrew, etc.) evidence obviously needs a methodological approach that is no less well-considered than the one advocated for the Egyptian material in Breathing Flesh to advance our understanding. Ignoring the methodology and simply broadening the evidence does not appear viable, and indeed Warburton makes no headway beyond pointing out that "jb and libbu are the same word, used with a very similar sense" (p. 379) - an observation which hardly comes as a great surprise to anyone who has studied the two languages, but the hermeneutical benefits of which are obviously limited. It is tempting to simply dismiss Warburton 's discussion with reference to this fundamental misunderstanding, but in the spirit of the present contribution we will once again assume that other readers may encounter similar difficulties and therefore provide a brief overview of the main points of the book along with the benefits brought by this approach over that adopted by Warburton as a matter of course. Broadly speaking, and as argued and illustrated in detail in chapter 2 of Breathing Flesh, the various positions found in previous research on the terms lb and fJ3ty can be divided into two overarching "schools". One hypothesis, labelled "lb as (metaphorical) heart" in Breathing Flesh, is the dominant, and evidently also the one supported by Warburton . According to this hypothesis, the basic anatomical reference of the word lb, like the word ｾ ｽ ｴｹＬ＠ is to the heart as a distinct anatomical entity, the main difference between the two words in the classical stage of the language being that ib tends to be used in a much wider range of metaphorical and abstract expressions. The other hypothesis, labelled " lb as stomach/ interior" takes its point of departure in a different subset of the material , focusing on the digestive function of the ib as well as other features corresponding less well with an interpretation of lb as the cardiac muscle. The two main proponents of this latter hypothesis have seen lb respectively as a reference to the stomach (Ebbell) and as a broader designation of the internal organs (Bardinet).18 There are several levels on which the question can be discussed. One is strictly empirical, asking which functions of the lb are actually attested in Egyptian texts. Another is methodological, examining the presuppositions of each of the hypotheses. This is where Warburton 's contention that "they were not blind" belongs. A third is philosophical, dealing with even more fundamental questions about what " the body" is, and whether we can assume that our intuitive categories are necessarily applicable in an ancient Egyptian context as well. The theoretical move proposed by Breathing Flesh would start the discussion , not at the empirical level , but rather at the philosophical one, by asking first of all whether particular occurrences of terms for body parts should be understood as references to 17 See e.g. Lacau 1970: 92 who notes that already when that (posthumously published) work was written, " [c]ette correspondance a ete reconnue depuis longtemps" . 18 See the overview in Nyord (2009a: 62-64). On (M is)conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt 175 part of the K6rper or part of the Leib, in other words whether the body part as accessible to the five senses is referred to, or rather a part of the lived body. The reason why this is important to clarifY from the outset is that, in the formulation by the German contemporary philosopher Hermann Schmitz, parts of the K6rper have characteristics quite different from parts of the Leib. Thus, for example, parts of the K6rper are divisible (anatomical body parts can be cut in two, for instance), whereas a part of the lived body, Leib, cannot (the experience of e.g. pain in a particular body part cannot be divided in two halves) . Similarly while parts of the K6rper have a fairly fixed shape, size and delineation , parts of the Leib tend to be able to change shape and size as well as to merge and split Up.1 9 It will be seen, for example, that Warburton 's contention that "they were not blind" only works under the assumption that ib is exclusively an anatomical term, that is, one that designates fundamentally a part of the K6rper. If, on the other hand, the ib was used predominantly as a designation of a part of the lived body, or Leib, we should look at a completely different set of questions where blindness would not figure in at all. Since, again as is argued in detail in Breathing Flesh, it is most likely that many references to the ib and ｾｴｹ＠ are to be located somewhere in between these two poles, one will need to examine each example carefully before assuming that e.g. the blindness argument is relevant in any given context. On this basis, the problem of the ib and ｾ ｾｴｹ＠ becomes a rather different one than in the traditional approach that Warburton revives. Instead of having just the question of the exact anatomical correlation of each of the terms, we now have a set of questions for each body part dealing with its respective use to designate a part of the K6rper and/or the Leib. As K6rper parts, we can still ask how the two concepts should be delineated , but we also have to consider in each case whether this approach is the most relevant to elucidate a particular use. The wide range of metaphorical expressions in particular clearly designate the body parts as parts of the lived body, and thus fall outside the purely anatomical domain, requiring a different conceptual approach. However, the first question to be answered is the distribution between usages of each of the terms according to each of the two body categories. Previous literature has often emphasised the particular tendency for the word ib to be used metaphorically, and as an initial observation it is pointed out in Breathing Flesh that Bardinet's suggestion of the "ib as interior" might have a good point in not insisting on a precise "anatomical reality" as the central meaning of ib. 20 There is no reason to replicate the discussion of the Coffin Texts evidence here, as this is already done at some length in Breathing Flesh, chapter 2 and summarised in an accessible form at Nyord 2009a: 108-113. To show precisely where Warburton goes wrong, however, it may be useful to summarise the main conclusions from that section. First, it is noted that the conceptual structures of the two terms ib and &?ty differ enough to make it clear that they are best treated as distinct concepts. This in turn means that the English gloss as " heart", while it mayor may not be the most anatomically precise rendering, is counterproductive when it comes to examining the 19 See now Nyord (2009b) for references and Egyptian examples. 20 Nyord (2009a: 67). 176 Rune Nyord relationship between the two Egyptian concepts. Because of this, the Egyptological gloss suggested by Bardinet, "interieur-ib" is adopted as "interior", but at the same time it is explicitly noted that the Coffin Texts examined in Breathing Flesh do not offer sufficient evidence for deciding for or against the specific anatomical reference understood by Bardinet. 21 The reason why this designation is still pertinent, even without commitment to Bardinet's anatomical interpretation, is that it carries with it the notion that ib might not be best understood as a precise anatomical term, a point which corresponds well with the finding in Breathing Flesh that the word has a strong tendency to be used of a part of the Leib, rather than the Korper. Thus, before moving on to Warburton's reading of this argument, it should be stressed explicitly that it is never claimed that the Coffin Texts (or any other texts included in the discussion) offer a basis for following Bardinet's precise anatomical identification, and in fact it is stressed explicitly and repeatedly that with the predominant use of the word ib to refer to a part of the Leib, the quest for such a precise anatomical identification may not only be beyond what can be reasonably deduced from the evidence, it may simply be the wrong question to ask. As has already been demonstrated, Warburton has not grasped the methodological point about the fundamental difference between the body as Korper and the body as Leib. Without this, nuanced points like the ones just paraphrased naturally become virtually incomprehensible. Even the fairly basic lexicographic distinction between a convenient gloss on the one hand and a lengthy, precise delineation and explication of an Egyptian term is lost on Warburton. When Warburton further writes that "[Nyord] decides thatjb means 'interior'" (p. 378) and that "In detail, even up to the bitter end, Nyord has decided to follow Bardinet and Servajean in identifYing the jb 'with the contents of the canopic jars' (p. 475) based on the 'theory' that the Egyptians did not know what the heart was" (p. 385) he has apparently blinded himself to fact that the passage he criticises is taken precisely from a section of the book summarising a discussion which expresses significant reservations about the specific anatomical interpretations of Bardinet and Servajean. 22 Warburton's use of the quote may therefore very well be the clearest illustration of just how fundamentally wrong one can go by innocently skipping parts of a theoretical chapter. Recapitulating the discussion above, Breathing Flesh argues that the anatomical (i.e. unquestioningly Korper-based) approach has not only been overstated, but indeed has reigned almost exclusively, in the previous treatments of the "heart" problem. One advantage of adopting the framework presented by Breathing Flesh is that it becomes 21 Nyord (2009a: 112t), " While no certain indications were found of the ib referring to the entirety of internal organs as understood by Bardinet, an anglicized version of his " interieur-ib" could well serve as a translation of the tenn, if only because the evidence has indicated the need to distinguish this word from the ｾ ｊ ｴ ｹＬ＠ at least when the words are used of Leibesinseln" . 22 The pertinent passage concluding the presentations of Bardinet's procreative hypothesis and its further development by Servajean reads fairly unequivocally "The model based on a progressive division of each parent' s contribution is somewhat suspect with its resemblance to a standard understanding of modem genetics. It is an interpretive hypothesis only and should be judged solely by its explanatory value. For the moment the model proposed by Bardinet and Servajean is best set aside" (Nyord 2009a: 423). How Warburton would reconcile this with his own claim of Breathing Flesh following Sardinet and Servajean "even up to the bitter end" is difficult to see. On (Mis)conceptions of th e Body in Ancient Egypt 177 unnecessary to assume that the terminological difficulties arose because the Egyptians were confused or unable to make apparently obvious distinctions. Such difficulties can best be accounted for as arising from attempts to approach the Egyptian terminology with an inadequate or inappropriate conceptual framework. At this point, it is best to turn to a methodological difficulty that seems once again to depend on an all too hasty reading of the first chapter, and more specifically of the section relating to the status of " metaphor" in the book. The word, of course, does not appear in the book ' s title, but since a significant number of the body parts occurring in the Coffin Texts occasionally form part of metaphors (in addition to numerous other usages), the concept plays an important role in the book, albeit in an indirect manner. Warburton , however, describes Breathing Flesh as no less than "a book on metaphors about the body" (p. 384). As one might expect, this disagreement on what the book is (or should be) about profoundly tinges the review, as Warburton goes looking for metaphors in all the wrong places, with an evident - and perfectly understandable sense of frustrati on as a result. This preoccupation with metaphor even leads to outright m isquotations, as when he claims that pp. 21-23 of the book are concerned with " Idealized cognitive metaphors" (p. 376), when in fact the heading in question reads " Idealized Cognitive Models" (a concept which incidentally has little directly to do with metaphor). Part of the problem clearly has to do with the understanding of the notion of image schemata and the way they are identified in practice in Breathing Flesh. In cognitive linguistics, image schemata are preconceptual structures that supply a structural framework for a wide range of relationships, be it metaphorically or literally. Thus, "There is water in the glass" and "There are misconceptions in the review" are both examples of the CONTA INER schema, as in both cases one entity is conceptualised as being contained within another. With Lakoff and Johnson,23 we can distinguish the first example as literal and the second as metaphorical (since the review as "concrete" object does not literally contain very much , least of all abstract entities such as misconceptions). In both cases, the CONTA IN ER schema provides conceptual structure, illustrating that an image schema can be used either literally or metaphorically. This subtlety appears to have been missed by Warburton , and instead of rereading the sections on image schemata and methodology when doubts about the conceptual basis of the work began to arise, he characteristically (and repeatedly) faults the book. Thus, the first time the problem occurs in the review, he writes "Nyord has difficulties with decapitation , which he associates with the ' link schema' (p. 145) - as if this was a metaphor, and not a real fear" (p. 379). As just described and exemplified (and discussed at greater length in the book itself), the perceived opposition between the ascription of an image schema and a " real" state of affairs is simply false. Just as the water is " really" in the glass when one describes its conceptual structure as being modelled on the CONTAIN ER schema, the head is " really" in danger of being cut off when structured by the LINK schema. Warburton persists at some length with this point: orifices are allegedly " viewed as a container metaphor [sic] (p. 145) rather than 23 The loclIs classiclls being the discussion of such " ontological metaphors" in Lakoff & Johnson ( 1980: 25-32) 178 Rune Nyord a passage,,24 (p. 379-380); " physical position and movements are confused with metaphors" (p. 380), the use of another body part " becomes metaphorical although the position of crowns can be understood as descriptive" (p. 380); "That the penis is attached to the body is not a link metaphor [sic] for something else" (p. 382), etc., etc. More generally, Warburton concludes several of his paragraphs dealing with this preoccupation with rhetorical flourish "There do not appear to be any compelling metaphors involved" (p. 380); " Yet this [sc. metaphor] is not there" (p. 380); " And in any case there is no metaphor" (p. 381); "as if this were a metaphor whereas the incidents involved may well have been descriptions of the observations of astronomical events in the sky" (p. 382), etc. It is difficult to disagree with the understanding of these passages as literal, and indeed, neither does the book. All the examples collected by Warburton of passages where he thinks I think they are metaphorical therefore become a lesson in futility . Not one of the passages in the book referred to by Warburton in this connection says anything about metaphors, but only about image schemata, which Warburton seems to treat as the same thing. A rereading of the pertinent parts of the first chapter could have saved Warburton from this basic misunderstanding which by being repeated at nauseam ends up becoming somewhat awkward - not to mention that it stands in the way of any intellectual engagement with the analyses presented in the passages in question. More puzzlingly, Warburton thinks, on one hand, that there are too many metaphors in Breathing Flesh, while, on the other, he does not think the " metaphorical" (in Warburton ' s own usage, which is not defined more narrowly) aspects of the phenomenon of Gliedervergottung are explored sufficiently (p. 380). In raising this question, he neglects to even refer to the detailed discussion of this phenomenon in Nyord 2009a: 510-522, so it is tempting to simply ascribe this criticism to. another oversight of an entire section of the book. However, it seems that the more fundamental problem is once again due to a misunderstanding of the nature of image schemata. Thus, Warburton notes that the discussion of the Gliedervergottung phenomenon " fails to make any reference to the image schemes [sic] around which the book is built", which allegedly leads to a "failure to categorize the form " (p. 380). Leaving aside the moot question whether Warburton would have been satisfied with the analysis of the phenomenon in the section he seems to have overlooked, again the underlying problem is that image schemata need to be analysed on the basis of linguistic structure. Although the "m of predication" is arguably derived from a metaphorical use of the CONTAIN ER schema,25 an expression like tp=k m rr, "your head is Re", basically does little more than ascribe an entity to a category and thus can offer only indirect evidence of image schemata. In the present case we find primarily the PA RT-WHOLE schema emerging because one side of the entities in the Gliedervergottung litanies consists of a list of the body parts of a single being. This is associated with a number of other image schemata and metaphorical structures, all discussed in some detail in the section of the book referred to above (Nyord 2009a: 510-522). 24 The page reference given by Warburton is wrong, he seems to have p. 149 in mind. 25 C f. Nyord (2010: 29f). On (Mis)conceptions of th e Body in Ancient Egypt 179 The example given above of the conceptual parallelism between water in the glass and misconceptions in the review also goes to show why Warburton is off the mark when taking issue with the identification of a particular body part as a " mere container" (p. 379). While there is obviously a reductive element involved in an analysis such as that presented in Breathing Flesh , it should also be clear that even though the "glass" and the " review" share a conceptual structure whereby they can function as containers, this is not meant to suggest (nor is it presented as such in Breathing Flesh) that all functions and perceptions of each object are captured by this characterisation - although arguably some fairly central ones are. Thus, for example, when it turns out that in the Coffin Texts the ib is frequently conceptualised as a never is, that is a CONTAINER (though rarely as a "mere container"), while the ｾ ＿ｴｹ＠ much more useful and precise way to capture one of the differences between the two terms than the problematic traditional "abstract heart" vs. " physical heart" (with variants). In a closely related problem, Warburton introduces a false dichotomy between "metaphors" and "names", referring to the fact that "few would regard the 'yardarm' of a sailing vessel as a metaphor" (p. 380). That may well be accurate as far as statistics go, but from the cognitive linguistic perspective taken in Breathing Flesh, the key to understanding why the "arm" occurs in such cases rather than, say "leg" or "heart" is to be found in the prototypical sense of these words as body parts, and the extension of the polysemic concept is thus by definition metaphorical,26 Again, Warburton offers no alternative analysis that might provide a better explanation for the evidence, but contents himself with pointing out the alleged errors and inconsistencies found in the book. The same attitude is revealed when one takes a closer look at what might appear to be genuinely constructive engagements with the book of the kind expected in an academic review. Thus Warburton claims that in the discussions of the word bsbrj, "lapis lazuli", the book 's author "fai l[s] to realize that this was at once the colour dark blue, and also a physical element of statuary with blue painted or lapis lazuli wigs" (p. 381). However, in the two cases referred to by Warburton, one (Nyord 2009a: 177) regards the word precisely (and explicitly) as a colour term in the way described by Warburton, while the other (Nyord 2009a: 152) deals with a case where both the grammatical structure (m bsbrj, " of lapis lazuli"), and the parallels with metals in the two following lines, make it quite clear that what is referred to is a body made of precious materials. The basis for Warburton ' s insight into what the author mayor may not realise is thus, to put it politely, not obvious, nor is it evident how his remarks improve, or even add to, what is already found in the book. There are several similar cases where only a very inattentive reading would serve as a charitable explanation of the reviewer's misunderstanding. For example, Warburton repeatedly criticises the fact that there is no independent section on the !It, " belly" (pp. 377, 383, 384), giving the impression that this is an oversight, whereas in fact the parallel treatment of ht, ib and ｾＳｴｹ＠ in chapter 2 is described and motivated on the very first page of that chapter (Nyord 2009a: 55, repeated at 68). In contrast to the more 26 See now also Nyord (20 12). 180 Rune Nyord fundamental misunderstandings discussed here at greater length, such fairly trivial errors, 27 while giving clear indications of the lack of care taken in reading the book and writing the review, offer little substance for constructive discussion and are thus ultimately of little interest to our current purposes. In contrast, the way in which image schemata are identified in practice (discussed most generally in Nyord 2009a: 48-50), is a fundamental part of the methodology that Warburton also seems to have misunderstood. As stressed repeatedly in the first, as well as subsequent chapters, the approach is fundamentally linguistic, and thus simply put, the basic method involves identifying key words and phrases indicative of basic image-schematic structures. Thus, for example, the preposition m in its locative use indicates the presence of the CONTAINER schema,28 as do various other more specific expressions such as "filling", "emptying", "coming out", "going in" etc. What all of these have in common is a conceptual structure in which one entity is conceptualised as being (actually or potentially, literally or metaphorically) inside another. Naturally, this approach may lead to ambiguous cases where several different image schematic structures might all be plausible interpretations, but in practice this is surprisingly rarely the case, and mainly concerns instances where the linguistic expressions themselves are ambiguous, e.g. when it is unclear if an instance of the preposition m should be understood as locative or as an instance of one of the other usages of the preposition. But in the vast majority of cases, the image-schematic structure follows fairly directly from the linguistic expressions, and this is a crucial point that Warburton does not seem to have grasped. Thus, for instance, Warburton complains in his summary of the concluding chapter that "Nyord repeats that the belly is a CONTAINER, and refers to the orifices, but refrains from identifying them as links; for him, extremities are LINKS because they are attached" (p. 383). The intuitive approach that Warburton appears to see as underlying the understanding of the extremities as structured by the LINK schema would indeed be problematic, and Warburton would be quite right to question why one but not another schema had been preferred. However, as will be seen, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the methodology. Thus rather than identifying extremities as "LINKS because they are attached", the LINK schema, as underlying the conceptual structure of the body parts in question, is deduced in a rigorous manner from expressions of severing or cutting off - expressions which, it might be added, are fairly rare in connection with extremities, as leafing through chapter 4 of Breathing Flesh would quickly have revealed. On this basis it should also be clear why we do not find similar expressions dealing with orifices - what Warburton seems to have in mind is their role as boundary zones or openings in a container (a role which is naturally discussed at length in Breathing Flesh, especially in chapter 8). If Warburton's discussion of the terms ib and ｾＵｴｹ＠ is already confused due to the misunderstanding of the theoretical approach, this is further exacerbated by this lack of recognition of the methodology. Thus, as already referred to, Warburton reads the book as presenting the ib as " a mere container" (p. 379), a view which he justly 27 Another example of a fundamental , but fairly banal , blunder is the ascription of the positions of scholars paraphrased in the book to the book' s author in the discussion of axiological principles on p.377. 28 See now also Nyord (20 I 0: 29-31). On (Mis)conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt 181 criticises. Likewise, he opines that the "references to efflux coming forth from thejwf hardly suggest that the container schema is the most relevant" (p. 381). While admittedly it is not exactly clear what Warburton intends with the statement, it at least once again shows his lack of grasp of the methodology: references to one entity coming forth from another by definition indicate the presence of the CONTAINER schema, be it literal or metaphorical. Similarly, it is of no consequence to the conceptual structure if iwf means " meat" (as Warburton suggests) rather than "flesh". A quick look in any dictionary will reveal that the word in fact covers both meanings, so it is a matter of arguing concretely in favour of one rather than the other in a given passage - though none of the examples Warburton quotes are particularly convincing in this regard, perhaps because in identifYing them he has apparently relied on the one-word glosses given in Breathing Flesh rather than looking up and examining the original passages in their context. With this methodology in mind, it should be evident why a relatively literal approach to translations is to be preferred in order to retain and explicate the conceptual structure of the original language. This policy is explained already at p. 3 of Breathing Flesh, but again Warburton prefers to present it as a sign of ineptitude, rather than entering into a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of such an approach. Thus Warburton notes of a literal translation that " it should be obvious that for the heart to accompany the person is simple - for the interior organs to lie in the hand is impossible, and undesirable. Thus the metaphor is in the preposition and the understanding of jb" (p. 383). What is at work here is clearly a process of grammaticalisation whereby m J goes from meaning " in the hand" to "with". The development can be analysed as a combination of metaphor and metonymy, and it is likely that the quoted example lies somewhere in the middle of this continuum of grammaticalisation. 29 Translating "with" in the English translation - while probably coming closer to the overall sense of the passage - would, however, have obscured precisely the derivation from an expression with a body part which is of primary interest in the context of Breathing Flesh. As elsewhere, the subsequent analysis of the expression in terms of the NEA R-FAR schema in the book will probably suffice for most readers in such cases to make clear the relationship between the notions of " in the hand" and "with". Occasionally, the misconceptions about the nature of image schemata seem to combine with a more general lack of familiarity with traditional philological methods to create more complex misunderstandings. Thus, Warburton (p. 380) is "surprised to find that the CONTROL schema is used with respect to the sum use of the legs (p. 283) where no metaphor is involved - but where the presence of power (wsr) is somehow given by virtue of horns and nails, the control [sic] schema is not cited (p. 274)". The explanation is straight-forward: The identification of the CONTROL schema is predicated in the first example on the presence of the collocation sum m, " have control over, access to", whereas no such collocation is found with wsr, giving the options to interpret the preposition in the cited example of wsr In as an example of either the " m of instrument" or the locative m (as pointed out explicitly in a note to the example, 29 For detailed examples of such a development in Copti c, see Nyord (forthcoming). 182 Rune Nyord Nyord 2009a: 274, n. 2827). If this seems to be a distinction fine enough to make it excusable for Warburton to miss it, I can assure prospective readers that such interpretative choices are almost always discussed explicitly in the book - this being no exception, as the potentially ambiguous expression m is indeed discussed at the first introduction of the CONTROL schema in Nyord 2009a: 81. Most attentive readers will thus have no cause for sharing Warburton's surprise. Having made this point in detail, we can dispense fairly quickly with the allegedly "particularly mysterious" (p. 380) identification of the LINK schema where Warburton would apparently have preferred NEAR-FAR. The two schemata can clearly come close to each other in meaning, but where something is ripped or cut off, the LINK is regarded as being stressed, whereas things being stolen, removed, thrown away etc. seem to stress the actual spatial separation (NEAR-FAR) rather than simply a severed LINK - but naturally in the case of body parts initially attached to the body, the latter schema logically presupposes the former. Again, the basic difference between the two schemata (LINK being a subschema of the more general image schema PART-WHOLE, and NEAR-FAR being a subschema of PATH) has been pointed out explicitly at Nyord 2009a: 49. In the same connection, Warburton would have preferred a speculative interpretation of ｳｷｾｴ＠ as "coffin" rather than "egg", although there is nothing in the spells in question to support this understanding. In the book, the key to analysing metaphors is the semantic domains activated by the wording of the text, whereas Warburton again appears to prefer a more intuitive approach where an egg can become a coffin whether textual support for this reading can be found or not, as long as it appears to " simplify matters" (p. 383). There is nothing inherently wrong with this more lax methodological approach, but it does not fit well with the linguistic approach taken in Breathing Flesh, and the fact that the reviewer in this and several other similar cases does not appear to even be aware of this difference does not show the basic understanding of the work that one would hope for in a review for an academic journal. Such examples could be readily multiplied in Warburton's review. However, as we have exemplified each of the main problems in the review, covering misconceptions of theory, method, philology and material , it is perhaps most fruitful at this point to move on to some of the broader questions. As has been seen, Warburton has misunderstood fundamental parts of the theory and method, but given that he is not an expert in any of the areas touched upon by the book, this is in itself excusable. In the same way, it is easy to empathise with the frustrated tone throughout the review of a book with which he has clearly experienced fundamental difficulties. Nonetheless, it will also be clear by this point why Warburton ' s review can offer very few advances in any of the fields touched upon by Breathing Flesh . Failing to even provide accurate summaries of the points argued and interpretations put forward in the book, the review can offer little in terms of reflective and relevant engagement with them. However, given that Breathing Flesh is hopefully not the final word on any of topics addressed, a few considerations about what avenues could be taken in future research seem to be relevant by way of conclusion. The great strength of the approach developed in Breathing Flesh is that it, to use a somewhat tired phrase, allows the texts to "speak for themselves" in the sense that the som On (Mis)conceptions of the Body in Ancient Egypt 183 conceptual structure can be analysed directly from the linguistic usage. This in turn obviates the need for the researcher to decide in advance which modern descriptive framework is most significant (should we discuss the Coffin Texts in terms of theology, anatomy, astronomy or some other modern discipline? Should we understand the statements in texts "figuratively" or "literally"?), by focusing instead on the linguistic structure of the text itself. This allows the researcher initially to " bracket" many of the questions that one would otherwise feel more or less forced to prejudge, such as whether ih is an anatomical or a psychological term (and why the Egyptians couldn't tell the difference). Thus, what to Warburton appears as an "iconoclastic definition" (p. 385) because it attempts to tackle the notoriously sensitive subject of Egyptian heart terminology without prejudging any underlying anatomy in fact allows us to characterise the difference (and similarity) between ih and bUy in a much more precise way than has been done in the past. In principle, this appears to be a very promising approach in many other areas dogged by similar methodological problems, not least ancient Egyptian medicine. An approach inspired by the methodology developed in Breathing Flesh would allow us to focus on questions where we can admit from the outset that they seem to have no simple correlate in modern anatomy, physiology or pathology. With a focus on the conceptual structure underlying the description of the phenomena studied, such questions become practically approachable and no more inherently problematical than cases where a particular equivalent in 3o modern medicine can readily be suggested. The price, of course, is that we have to be ready to accept that the Egyptian conceptual framework is too complex to be well served by the one to one application of modern folk-medical terminology. On the other hand, once we get used to this thought, it doesn ' t actually appear all that surprising to anyone that has studied e.g. the Egyptian healing literature in any detail. And fortunately the combination of cognitive linguistic methodological tools and a phenomenological analytical framework means that we won't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they offer liS other conceptual frameworks than modem anatomy that work as slightly less of a straightjacket when applied to the indigenous terminology. Whether such an approach actually succeeds in advancing our understanding of Egyptian thought naturally depends on the way it is carried out in practice. In principle it is unlikely that Breathing Flesh as a first major attempt in this direction will have been entirely successful, and in any case, as Warburton rightly points out, the book is rather limited in its scope (although at 645 pp. others will perhaps excuse it for having narrowed down the topic of inquiry). I will be the first to welcome qualified discussion in this regard. This, however, is one thing Warburton fails to deliver. Bibliography Berkemer. Georg & Guido Rappe (eds.). 1996. Das Her= im Kulturvergleich, Berlin. Gardiner, Alan H. 1956. Egyptian Grammar. Being an Introduction to the Study of ｈｩ edition. Oxford . ･ ｲｯｧｾｹ ｰｨｳ Ｌ＠ 3 rd 30 A good example is the role played by temperature, particularl y heat, in the medical texts - a subject on which I hope to publish a study in the not-too-distant future. 184 Rune Nyord Grenbech, Vilhelm. 1942. Hellas. Kultur og religion 1: Adelstiden, Copenhagen. Lacau, Pierre. 1970. Les noms des parties du corps en egyptien et en setnitique , Paris. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By, Chicago & London. Meskell, Lynn M. 2004. Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present, Oxford. & Rosemary A. Joyce. 2003. Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyptian Experience, London. Nyord, Rune. 2007. The Body in the Hymns to the Coffin Sides, in: Chronique d 'Egypte 82, 5-34. 2009a. Breathing Flesh. Conceptions of the Body in the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, CNI Publication 37, Copenhagen. 2009b. 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Studies in Ancient Egyptian Anatomical Terminology, The Australian Centre for Egyptology Studies 4, Warrninster. Warburton , David. 2010. Review of P.J . Frandsen, Incestuolls and Close-Kin Marriage in Ancient Egypt and Persia: An Examination of the EVidence, in: Lingua Aegyptia 18, 339-346. 2011. Review of R. Nyord, Breathing Flesh. Conceptions of the Body in the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, in: Lingua Aegyptia 19, 375-386. Weeks, Kent. 1979. Art, word, and the Egyptian world-view, in: Kent Weeks (ed.), Egyptology and the Social Sciences: Five Studies, Cairo, 59-81.