Leo Depuydt
Associate Professor:
Egyptology & Ancient Western Asian Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 3131
Phone 2: +1 401 863 3132
Leo_Depuydt@Brown.EDU
I am curious about all aspects of ancient Egypt and its wider Near Eastern and Mediterranean context, but especially about the languages and the history of the area. Specific topics of research include Coptic manuscripts; the grammar of all stages of Egyptian; the history of the Egyptian language; language and logic; chronology, calendrics, astronomy, and heortology; science and mathematics.
Biography
A native of Flanders, Leo Depuydt studied ancient Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the Catholic University of Leuven, the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, served for some months in the Belgian military, and briefly worked and lived at a Benedictine abbey in Bruges, before completing his doctoral work at Yale (1985–1990), where he also taught as Senior Lector in Coptic and Syriac (1989–1991). He has authored, or co-authored as editor, eleven books and written close to one hundred and ten articles and about forty scholarly reviews on topics relating to ancient and medieval manuscripts, languages, and history, with primary focus on ancient Egyptian civilization. He has been at Brown since 1991.
Current positions:
- Director of Graduate Study
Undergraduate Concentration Advisor
Interests
Ever since writing a philological and grammatical commentary of a poem by the late Latin author Paulinus of Nola and a history of the study of the verbal system of classical hieroglyphic Egyptian as licentiate theses for the University of Leuven (1979, 1981), my research has focused in no small part though by no means exclusively on two facets that are fundamental and foundational to the understanding of ancient civilizations whose heritage has had to be retrieved from oblivion. They are language and chronology. Chronology provides—along with calendrics and ancient astronomy—the framework of history. Our modern calendar, instituted by Caesar in 45 B.C.E., furnishes a kind of continuity back to the time of its beginning that makes chronology much less of a concern to "A.D." historians than to "B.C." historians. To B.C. historians, just determining the order and dates of events is no small matter. As for language, the full elucidation of textual materials involves endeavors of many sorts, including the study of manuscript collections and the analysis of the grammatical structure of languages in their synchronic and historical dimensions. It is worth noting that Egyptian has the longest attested history of any of the world's languages. Five successive stages are distinguished: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. The first four are written in hieroglyphic scripts. Coptic is written mainly with the Greek alphabet. Coptic is also by far the most transparent and best known of all the stages. Consequently, the intense study of Coptic can deeply inspire the study of the earlier stages of Egyptian. The Coptic language as well as Coptic or Christian-Egyptian culture in its Christian-Oriental setting, including the study of Syriac and Arabic, has engaged my attention and interest. The published version of my Yale doctoral dissertation is a two-volume catalogue raisonné (Leuven: Peeters, 1993) of the Coptic collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan. "Pierpont Morgan has often—and justifiably—been referred to," writes the director of the Morgan Library in the foreword to the catalogue, "as the most spectacular collector this country has ever produced. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this occurred in 1911, when Morgan purchased en bloc most of the ancient Coptic manuscripts which had been discovered . . . on the site of the Monastery of St. Michael near the [Egyptian] village of Hamuli." I have more recently also turned my attention to the grammar of Demotic, which seems to be the least studied of the five stages of Egyptian in this regard. And lately, my interest in the phenomenon of language has led to various applications of mathematical logic—including Boolean algebra—to the structure of Egyptian and of languages in general.
Awards
Wriston Grant for Excellence in Teaching, Brown University, Summer 1994
Grant from the Faculty Development Fund ($1000), Brown University, 1991
Fulbright Exchange Scholar (Belgium to U.S.A.), 1985–90
Whiting Prize Fellowship, Yale University, 1988–89
John F. Enders Prize Fellowship, Yale University, 1988
Bibliographical Society of America Fellowship, 1988
Aylwin Cotton Foundation Award, United Kingdom, 1988
University Fellowship, Yale University, 1987–88
Josephine de Kármán Fellowship, 1987
Julian J. Obermann Fellowship, Yale University, 1986–87
Grants from Middlebury College and Yale University for Arabic Course at Middlebury, Summer 1986
University Fellowship, Yale University, 1985–86
Council of Europe Higher Education Scholarship, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, 1984–85
Government of Israel Scholarship, 1982–83
Dissertation Award, Belgian Ministry of Education, 1982–83
Helen H. Scheuer Fellowship, Hebrew Union College, 1981–82
Student Travel Grants: Yale Endowment for Egyptology (1986, 1987); Fulbright (1986); Vlaamse Leergangen, Louvain (1984)
William J. Horwitz Prize, "For Continuous Excellence and Distinction," Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Yale University, 1990
Dissertation passed with Distinction, Yale University, 1990
Finalist, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1988
Comprehensive exams on Egyptology, Coptic Studies, and Christian Arabic passed with Distinction, Yale University, May 1987
Highest Score, Arabic Summer Course, Middlebury College, Summer 1986
Laureate, Latin–Greek Humanities (high school), 1975
Affiliations
Memberships in Learned Societies:
American Friends of the École Biblique in Jerusalem (1996–2001)
American Oriental Society (1991– )
American Research Center in Egypt (1986– )
Association of Ancient Historians (2001– )
Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) (1998– )
International Association of Armenian Studies (1991– )
International Association of Coptic Studies (1984– )
International Association of Egyptology (1985– )
International Association of Nubian Studies (1998– )
New York Academy of Sciences (1996–1997)
New York Egyptological Seminar (1996–2001)
Funded Research
N/A
Curriculum Vitae
