Kristina Hutter

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Being an Egyptologist, my focus lies in studying ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, mortuary culture and funerary texts. After finishing my MA at the University of Vienna, I received a research grant from the Foundation for Postgraduates in Egyptology (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and became research assistant in the FWF funded project Egyptian Root Lexicon. Since 2018 I have been a university assistant (prae:doc, uni:docs fellow) at the Institute for Egyptology. My work has a strong interdisciplinary emphasis and has profited immensely from my fellowship in the Vienna Doctoral Academy ‘Theory and Methodology in the Humanities’. One of my main sources of inspiration is cultural immersion, extensive travels and fieldwork in Egypt.

Research Interests: ancient Egyptian world views, religion, language and the hieroglyphic writing system; topological and cognitive approaches to religious and ritual texts, cognitive semantics, ritual theory, cultural landscapes, translation studies

Current Research Project: Topological Concepts in Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts. Spatial Imagery of the Beyond in Ancient Egyptian Religious Literature 

My PhD is an interdisciplinary project investigating knowledge and spatial symbolism in the world’s oldest religious corpus of the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. The main aim is to reconstruct a topological map of the beyond onto which the symbolic spacetime of the passage into the beyond can be mapped. The research follows a non-reductionist method based on cognitive semantics that considers world knowledge as a semantically relevant category in analysing religious texts. I hence also look at how the geographical environment influences cultural imaginations of the beyond and examine how the landscapes and spatial information in the Pyramid Texts reflect the cultural landscapes of the Nile Valley in the 24th century BCE.

Publications:

  • (submitted) Locating the Beyond. On Problems and Possibilities of Interpreting Spatial Information in the Pyramid Texts, in: O. el-Aguizy and B. Kasparian (eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Egyptologists (ICE XII), held in Cairo between the 3rd and 8th of November 2019, to be published by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt and the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO).
  • Ein Ort mit Perspektive. Gedanken zur Erschließung der Raumsemantik in den Pyramidentexten, in: A. Verbovsek et al. (eds), (Un)Sterblichkeit: Schrift – Körper – Kult. Beiträge des neunten Berliner Arbeitskreises Junge Aegyptologie (BAJA 9) 30.11.–2.12.2018, GOF IV / 67, Wiesbaden 2020, p. 75–86.
  • Das sḏm⸗f-Paradigma im Mittelägyptischen. Eine Vergleichsstudie verschiedener Grammatiken, Lingua Aegyptia – Studia Monographica 18 (2017), Hamburg, X + 289 p.