Brief remarks on the Egyptian verbal system
The verbal morphology of Ancient Egyptian turns out to be one of the most intricate topics in Egyptian linguistics
There are many reasons for this, and an exhaustive exposition would be too elaborate here. Certainly one of the causes lies in the absence of vocalization in writing, a peculiarity that makes an examination of the various verb forms extremely questionable and approximate. The verb in fact expresses a "dynamic" action that is expressed precisely by a certain placement of the vowels that serve as a desinence to the verbal theme. Another cause that certainly does not facilitate the task of interpreting verbal morphology relating to the Egyptian language of the Old and Middle Kingdom lies in the fact, as Loprienus observes (cf. A. Loprienus: Ancient Egyptian, Cambridge Un. Press pp. 73) that while the morphology of nouns between Old and Middle Kingdom compared to Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic turns out to be marginal, it is not so for the verbal forms where one detects I would say a break between Old and Middle Kingdom on the one hand and Late Egyptian and Coptic on the other.
Since Coptic serves as an aid, often decisive, in the interpretation of hieratic and hieroglyphic writing since it is a writing with vowels (phase of Hellenization of writing), its aid in the correct interpretation of verbal forms related to the Archaic and Middle Kingdom language is considerably tenuous.
With regard then to Late Egyptian, which replaced periphrastic constructions based on prefixes followed by infinitival forms, the same makes the understanding of vowel alternation exceedingly nebulous. Such issues have undergone a number of evolutions and/or modifications among scholars over the course of time, from the school of Budge to that of Sethe and his pupils Gardiner and Polotsky (the latter creator of Standard Theory) and many others. But beyond these undoubted considerations, I would like to highlight here an extremely important element: the Egyptian verb has a profoundly different structure from that of today's Indo-European languages. The Italian verbal system derived from Latin for example, but this of course applies to other Western languages as well, hinges basilarily on the concept of time.
Basically in our language there is a tendency to place the action in a definite period of the present, past or future and to examine it in relation to the other actions in the sentence. This determines the reciprocal relationship of anteriority, contemporaneity or posteriority. The Egyptian verbal system is fundamentally different: in fact, tenses express more than the aspect of chronological progression of events, the aspect of verbal action for itself outside temporality.
So I would say a static aspect, as Roccati states, in that the verb essentially highlights the concept of action placed outside a dynamic temporality due to the succession of events. Indeed, the verbal action per se tends to show whether the same is durative, punctual, accomplished or virtual in a timeless manner. Thus we speak more of perfective, imperfective, stative (aka pseudo participle or even old perfective), rather than perfect, imperfect, etc. On closer inspection, the approach as enunciated resembles, in certain aspects, the ancient Egyptian verb with the verbal system of ancient Greek where, it is well known, the aorist emphasizes an action caught in its momentariness or atemporality, albeit aimed at past events. However, I think it appropriate to mention that in Coptic the concept of the temporality of events as a chronological succession of events began to develop. Of course, trying to give an answer to why the Egyptian verb is fundamentally connoted by timelessness, as opposed to Western languages where there is a tendency, as mentioned, essentially to give maximum emphasis to the temporal configuration, is exceedingly difficult.
Probably the writing was first and foremost essentially addressed (I refer especially to hieroglyphics) to sacred purposes where the concept had to express values outside real time: sentences, mottos, exaltations of heroic deeds of rulers, etc. The reader had to understand its content which was finalized in serving as a teaching, a guide. Time therefore, understood as a chronological progression of action, was meaningless. This impression of mine is also supported by the fact that precisely with the advent of Copticism began that slow evolutionary phase hinged on the principle of the cohesion of tenses connecting and characterizing the period of verbal action observed from the speaker's point of view.
