Prof. Allen is one of a small number of Egyptologists currently involved in a reevaluation of the model by which the earliest stages of the ancient Egyptian language is understood. In 2013, he hosted an international workshop on the subject at Brown, the results of which have been published in the Department's Wilbour Studies series of scholarly monographs.
The main thrust of my research since 2010 has been on the verbal system of Earlier (Old and Middle) Egyptian. Previous models of the language have proven either inaccurate or overly mechanical in explaining the formal, semantic, and syntactic features of a number of verb forms. As a result, I and a number of my colleagues in Europe have begun to rethink our approach to the data. My contribution since 2010 has been to identify the phenomenon of gemination (consonant doubling) as a lexical feature rather than an inflectional one, to reduce the inventory of a primary verb form (the sḏm.f) from six forms to two in Old Egyptian (unmarked and marked, the latter expressing incompletion) and only one in Middle Egyptian, to re-analyze the use of two verb forms (the sḏm.f and sḏm.n.f) in relative clauses as a feature of syntax rather than inflection, and to re-analyze the so-called “emphatic” construction (in which the verb is thematic rather than rhematic) as conditioned by context rather than by inflection or syntax.
These all reflect my conviction that previous analyses of the Egyptian verbal system (including some of my own) have been corrupted by the unconscious biases that stem from translations into our own languages. For example, the Late Egyptian sḏm.f has been analyzed as concealing two inflected forms, preterite and subjunctive, because its uses require one or the other translation. Both forms, however, look exactly the same in writing, and it makes more sense to understand them as reflecting only one inflected form, unmarked for either tense or mood.
For the last few years I have been working primarily on the Pyramid Texts, the oldest substantial body of ancient Egyptian literature. Most recently, I have begun work on a comprehensive grammar of the Pyramid Texts, which does not yet exist. To that end, I recently compiled a new concordance of all published sources from the Old Kingdom, a six-volume work that has been made freely available online (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0xo88uy04urnz0v/o16_ojF8f_), the first volume of my grammar, dedicated to the oldest Pyramid Texts, those of Unis (Dyn. V, ca. 2323 BC), and the second volume, on the Pyramid Texts of queen Neith (Dyn. VI, ca. 220 BC), now in progress. In 2018, I completed a study of Egyptian phonology and a compilation of my thoughts on ancient Egyptian thought.
