4. Old Egyptian multi-word expressions in Unas’ and Teti’sPyramid Texts (24th to 23rd c. BCE)

The Pyramid Texts is a collection of spells recorded on the walls of the Pyramids of Old Kingdom kings (ca. 2543–2120 BCE). They are written in Old Egyptian and are the oldest corpus of Egyptian religious texts. The Pyramid Texts have been edited by Kurt Sethe (1908–1922), Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte nach den Papierabdrücken und Photographien des Berliner Museums (4 vols.), and by James P. Allen (2013), A New Concordance of the Pyramid Texts (6 vols). The morphosyntactic annotation of the Pyramid Texts in the Universal Dependencies Egyptian-Pre-Coptic Treebank began in March 2024. It currently contains the two oldest corpora of the Pyramid Texts, these are Unas’s Pyramid Texts (ca. 2321–2305 BC) and most of Teti’s Pyramid Texts (ca. 2305–2279). The EPC treebank has been used to identify all multi-word expressions in Unas’ and Teti’s Pyramid Texts based on the PARSEME 2.0 guidelines. This chapter not only provides the exact number of multi-word expressions in the two oldest Pyramid Texts corpora, but also analyses their meaning and morphosyntactic function.