Since the 1850s modern scientific logic, or symbolic logic, has supplanted Aristotelian and scholastic logic. The pioneer is George Boole (1815–1864). In the late 1930s, an MIT graduate student, Claude Shannon, adapted Boolean algebra for electronic circuits. The computer age had begun. In the present investigation, several facets of Egyptian are treated in light of modern scientific logic. No prior knowledge of logic is assumed. Everything needed is defined internally.

Topics include: definitions of condition and premise, of the difference between the two and premise, and of how to get from one to the other and back; the balanced sentence; the conditio sine qua non and its relation to the normal condition; the rise of existential expressions in the history of Egyptian; and the question as to whether we moderns are smarter than the ancient Egyptians. These topics are treated in order to expose the basic articulation of thought into three levels and to suggest the inability of thought to break out of this three-level pattern. The three-level model can transparently absorb abstract terms such as “causality,” “condition,” “result,” “consequence,” “premise,” “thought,” “truth,” “certainty,” “right and wrong,” and many others. Everyone senses what these terms mean. Defining them precisely is another matter.

A native of Flanders, Leo Depuydt studied ancient Greek, Latin, 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, 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 about 110 articles and 40 reviews on topics relating to ancient and medieval manuscripts, languages, and history, with primary focus on ancient Egypt. He has been at Brown University since 1991, teaching in its Department of Egyptology, which was reconstituted in 2005 as the Department of Egyptology and Ancient West Asian Studies to reflect a wider focus on the origins of science and the humanities in the ancient Near East.