Do Mummies Dream of Electric Sheep? What ancient Egyptian hypertexts can tell us about the cultural and technological modalities of storytelling
Creators: name: Moers, Gerald
name: Jurman, Claus
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Storytelling
Egyptology
narratology

description: <strong>“The past is a foreign country: they tell stories differently there” could be an appropriate motto for the approach represented by this contribution. In our paper we aim to demonstrate that studying narrative communication of an ancient culture is not only a worthwhile enterprise, it can also contribute to our understanding of what it means to tell stories in non-conventional formats in the digital world.</strong> <strong>With the growing impact of narratological perspectives on many fields of the humanities and the social sciences it has become received wisdom that narratives permeate our lives and social interactions. While the medium for relating and transmitting stories was for a long time associated almost exclusively with written and oral text, the technological developments of the past decades have helped to change our views on the relation between storytelling and media-related representation. Questions are increasingly focussing on the many different ways in which stories are manifesting themselves in different technological, social and cultural contexts, how they are shaped by different media and themselves influence the way in which the narrative potential of those media evolves. Modern technology – especially digital technology – is seen by many as forging new, unprecedented possibilities of creating complex, globally relatable stories, which are not infringed by the constraints of linear text production. But despite widespread acknowledgment of the ubiquity and universal appeal of storytelling our analytical toolkits and theoretical representations are still very much dependent on modern, primarily Western, understandings of what constitutes a narrative in the first place. From a historical and anthropological perspective there exists a real danger that narratological axioms derived from cultural products of the last 100 years are taken for granted without proper historization and then fed back into digital research environments where they become reified in linguistic corpora and other formats. This is precisely where our ongoing research project (Austria’s Central Bank Research Fund no. 17922) on ancient Egyptian narratives aims to make a difference. Through case studies we will illustrate the complex interplay between textual, visual and socio-pragmatic dimensions of narrative communication in ancient Egypt. No matter whether one looks at the biographical discourse in tomb decoration or the “single-image story cues” found on ancient “doodles”, there is ample evidence that ancient Egyptian logics of storytelling are not always compatible with our traditional expectations of the sequential presentation of tellable events. On the other hand, some of these “alien” modes of narration share many features with digital formats of today, where hypertextuality, associative pattering and multimodal communication are common features. It is therefore all the more regrettable that Egyptology and similar disciplines are still grappling with adequately representing the multidimensionality of ancient narrative production in digital repositories, which in the majority of cases still conform to the monomodal digital corpus type (cf., e.g., TLA).</strong>