My research focuses on the nature of an ancient Egyptian deity, the desert god Ha, ‘Lord of the West’, who most probably had a foreign origin. I consider all his textual and figural sources, ranging from the Predynastic Period to the Roman Period. The investigation of the pre-Twenty-first Dynasty sources, including unpublished documents, was completed in a doctoral thesis, and the holistic study of the later sourcesl is in progress.

One of the aims of my research is to inquire how texts and representations about an actual deity manifest the ancient Egyptians’ concepts associated with the desert and the west. Therefore, using a semantic approach, I also try to identify the types of meaning transfer in this cognitive process, as well as to investigate the desert-related lexemes in the Ha texts, with a semantic approach.

Thanks to the nature of the sources at my disposal, I am able to investigate certain religious texts from the point of view of textual transmission, with a special attention to a sequence of the Pyramid Texts (Provisioning Texts) as well as New Kingdom private tomb inscriptions. These texts provide us with excellent examples of textual production and reproduction, as well as the transmission of concepts.

As a member of the TT 65 Project of Eötvös Loránd Univesity’s Hungarian Archaeological Mission in Thebes, I investigate the bandeau inscriptions located on the ceiling of the New Kingdom tomb of Nebamun/Imiseba. I aim at identifying the content of the texts from a liturgical point of view and setting them in the broader context of liturgical texts. This relates the identification of the possible antecedents, conceptual or literary parallels, and the question of intertextuality as well. Finally, I consider the relationship between the ritual space and the content of the text occupying it.