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Ancient Egypt is one of the most fascinating civilizations in history, with a rich culture, impressive architecture, and numerous achievements that still amaze us today. If you're studying this ancient civilization or simply have a keen interest in it, you may find yourself needing essay topic ideas. To help you out, here are 115 Ancient Egypt essay topic ideas and examples that cover various aspects of this captivating civilization:

• The significance of the Nile River in Ancient Egypt's development.
• The role of pharaohs in Ancient Egypt's political structure.
• Comparing and contrasting the roles of men and women in Ancient Egyptian society.
• The construction and purpose of the pyramids.
• The religious beliefs and practices of Ancient Egyptians.
• The process of mummification and its importance in Ancient Egypt.
• The significance of hieroglyphics in Ancient Egyptian communication.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian art on other civilizations.
• The impact of trade and commerce on Ancient Egypt's economy.
• Exploring the social hierarchy in Ancient Egyptian society.
• The role of priests and temples in Ancient Egyptian religious life.
• The importance of the afterlife in Ancient Egyptian beliefs.
• The contributions of Ancient Egyptian mathematics and astronomy.
• The role of women in religion and worship in Ancient Egypt.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian medicine on modern practices.
• The cultural significance of Ancient Egyptian jewelry.
• The process of deciphering hieroglyphics and its impact on our understanding of Ancient Egypt.
• The role of animals in Ancient Egyptian religion and symbolism.
• The impact of the annual flooding of the Nile on Ancient Egyptian agriculture.
• The evolution of Ancient Egyptian architecture over time.
• The use of magic and amulets in Ancient Egyptian society.
• The significance of the Rosetta Stone in decoding Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
• The role of music and dance in Ancient Egyptian culture.
• The impact of foreign invasions on Ancient Egypt's decline.
• The portrayal of Ancient Egypt in popular culture and media.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian literature and storytelling.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian fashion on later civilizations.
• The role of scribes in Ancient Egyptian society.
• The impact of climate change on Ancient Egypt's civilization.
• The significance of obelisks in Ancient Egyptian architecture.
• The role of Nubia in Ancient Egypt's trade and cultural exchange.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian festivals and celebrations.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian beliefs and practices on modern spirituality.
• The significance of the Book of the Dead in Ancient Egyptian funerary rituals.
• The role of women as rulers in Ancient Egypt.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian inventions on later civilizations.
• The process of creating papyrus and its importance in Ancient Egyptian writing.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses in everyday life.
• The impact of the Hittite-Egyptian peace treaty on Ancient Egypt's foreign relations.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian tombs and burial rituals.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian education and learning.
• The impact of natural resources on Ancient Egypt's economy.
• The development of Ancient Egyptian military strategies and weapons.
• The significance of the Valley of the Kings in Ancient Egyptian history.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian queens in the royal family.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian agriculture on food production.
• The significance of the Sphinx in Ancient Egyptian mythology.
• The role of magic and spells in Ancient Egyptian daily life.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian architecture on Greek and Roman structures.
• The significance of the Amarna Period in Ancient Egyptian history.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian trade routes on cultural exchange.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian priests in maintaining social order.
• The significance of the Great Sphinx in relation to pharaohs.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian hairstyles and cosmetics on fashion trends.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian astronomy on navigation.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian chariots in warfare.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian priests in healing and medicine.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on writing systems.
• The significance of the Temple of Luxor in Ancient Egyptian religion.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian queens as regents.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian architecture on modern-day buildings.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian amulets in protection and symbolism.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian textiles on fashion and design.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs as divine rulers.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian animal mummies in religious rituals.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian musical instruments on later civilizations.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian irrigation systems on agriculture.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian artisans in creating beautiful artwork.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian boats in trade and transportation.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian mirrors and cosmetics in daily life.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian temples on tourism today.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian priests in performing rituals and ceremonies.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian board games in leisure activities.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian hairstyles on beauty standards.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian jewelry on fashion trends.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian scribes in record-keeping and administration.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian canopic jars in mummification.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian perfume on the fragrance industry.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian courtship and marriage rituals.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian dancers in religious ceremonies.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian wall paintings in tombs.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian ophthalmology in eye treatments.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian boats on maritime navigation.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian musicians in entertainment.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian love poetry in literature.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian hairstyles on modern hairdressing.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian pottery on ceramics.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian embalmers in the mummification process.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian scarab beetles in symbolism.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian tattoos in body art.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian agricultural practices on sustainable farming.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian architects in city planning.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian animal worship in religion.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian fashion on costume design.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian musical notation on music composition.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian dancers in storytelling.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian magical spells in daily life.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian mirrors in personal grooming.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian naval warfare on maritime history.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian queens as political advisors.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian funeral processions in honoring the deceased.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian hairstyles on modern hair accessories.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian pottery on trade and cultural exchange.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian embalmers in preserving the dead.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian scarab amulets in protection.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian tattoos in social status.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian agricultural techniques on modern farming.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian architecture on urban planning.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian priests in animal worship.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian fashion in expressing identity.
• The role of Ancient Egyptian musicians in religious ceremonies.
• The impact of Ancient Egyptian magical spells on daily life.
• The significance of Ancient Egyptian mirrors in reflecting beauty ideals.
• The importance of Ancient Egyptian naval technology in maritime exploration.
• The influence of Ancient Egyptian queens on political decision-making.

These essay topic ideas provide a broad range of choices for exploring various aspects of Ancient Egypt. Whether you're interested in its art, religion, social structure, or technological advancements, there's a topic here to suit your interests. Dive into the enchanting world of Ancient Egypt and discover the wonders of this ancient civilization through your essays.

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Ancient Egypt - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Ancient Egypt is a civilization known for its pyramids, pharaohs, and the Nile River, existing from 3100 BC to 332 BC. An essay on this topic could delve into its rich history, culture, architectural, and scientific achievements. Furthermore, discussions could explore the influence of Ancient Egypt on subsequent civilizations and its enduring legacy in modern society. A vast selection of complimentary essay illustrations pertaining to Ancient Egypt you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Ancient Egyptian Art

Ancient Egyptian Art is an art form that everybody is familiar with. From its iconic pyramids, to its detailed and distinct hieroglyphs, everyone takes notice and can recognize this ancient art from a mile away. Art in Egypt hasn't really changed over the course of artistic development. There were seven periods of this development which included the predynastic, the old kingdom, the middle kingdom, the new kingdom, the Amarna period, the late period and the Ptolemaic period. That's because Egyptian […]

How did the Nile Shape Ancient Egypt

For the people from ancient Egypt which are called ancient Egyptians, the Nile River; the world's longest river, is the most important water feature for them. The ancient Egyptians distinguished the Nile River as the "Mother of All Men and as the "Father of Life. Ancient Egyptians also had a religious belief that the Nile River was actualized by Hapi; a god who for them would cause yearlasting floods. Hapi would often get celebrated by the ancient Egyptians since the […]

Social Hierarchies in Ancient Civilizations

According to Karl Marx, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."(Marx 1). This is also true for ancient civilizations. Ancient Egypt, China, and India all had social classes that their people adhered to. In contemporary society we have nearly eliminated such classes. There is no longer any need to have set classes in place. Contrary to ancient times, people are now able to move freely from one class to another based off of their […]

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Ancient Egypt and the Shang Dynasty

Similar to ancient Egypt, the Shang dynasty also used religion to explain things that are unexplainable. The Shang Dynasty worshipped many types of deities including weather gods, sky deities, and river deities, yet the most powerful deity was Shang-Di. Shang-Di was the highest of gods, in other words, king of all gods. Related to Shang-Di is Tian ming which also determined who the monarch will be or emperor of China by giving them the Mandate of Heaven which is the […]

Ancient Egyptian Death Masks

"Despite all their hopes for the afterlife,the ancient egyptians could not escape the natural human fear of death and it's many unknowns(Wilkinson,2018)To solve this problem the egyptians produced different death masks with different symbolisms tied to them.these masks were worn by all egyptians from the richest pharaohs to the poorest slaves. Death masks have had many purposes from the beginning of the mummification .one purpose was to enable the mummy to have a face in the afterlife. This was important […]

The Pyramids of Egypt

Did you know that pyramids were around in 25 B.C? There were drawings in side of the pyramids. There was a 30 -meters above the queen's chamber. They used limestone bricks to build their pyramids. Some people thought that the pyramids were not build 4,000 years ago. They are right because they were built in 12,500 years ago. The pyramids were built in the south. The dead rulers were buried in pyramids. Egypt is located in the north eastern in […]

Ancient Egyptian Music and Dance

Did you ever wonder why ancient Egyptians performed (played music or danced)? Well, ancient Egyptians loved to perform. They used many different types of music and dance. Music and dance were very important to the ancient Egyptians. Ancient Egyptians performed mostly to entertain. The ancient Egyptians performed because they used it as communication with the gods. One way they communicated with the gods was, the human response to the gift of life. One of the gods they worshiped was, a […]

Ancient Egyptian Mummification

Mummification in ancient Egypt had a very large effect on the Egyptian culture, it became a very important aspect of the religion, and evolved over time. Sometimes animals where mummified but the process was originally only for the rich and elite of certain classes. The actual mummification of ancient Egypt is a very interesting process to many people. Throughout the years the mummification wasn't limited to just for the pharaohs, it was also for the religious class, and later expanded […]

Fall of Ancient Civilizations Due to Agriculture

Soil plays an important part in people's daily lives. It plays a factor in how plants grow, how it can filter our water, provides essential nutrients to our forests and crops, and it also helps regulate the Earth's temperature. It also plays a role in our food source. Without soil how would we grow our vegetables and fruits? Without proper care for the soil most civilizations would rapidly decline. For example, many ancient civilizations rose in power but declined rapidly […]

An Afterlife of the Ancient Egyptians

Ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife. However, to reach paradise of an everlasting life they had to battle their way through hell. To reach their destination they had to battle demons, cross rivers of fire, and passed through twelve gates. If they are killed in hell, they would be stuck there for eternity of nothingness. If the people made it through uninjured, they would then be put on trial by the gods. They would weight their hearts against the feather […]

Ancient Egyptian Culture and Tradition

Ancient Egyptian culture carries many misconceptions and was frequently misunderstood. Much different than modern Egypt, the rich, powerful, and unorthodox empire originated around 3000 BCE and lasted through 20 BCE when it was conquered by the Roman empire. Popularized by giant monuments, numerous controversial pharaohs, and historic landmarks, many are not aware of the smaller know details surrounding ancient Egyptian cultural traditions: such as its various technological advancements or its fascination with life after death. In short, ancient Egypt was […]

Acceptance of Homosexuality in Different Ancient Civilizations

Homosexuality refers to the attraction between two people of the same sex. Homosexuality dates back to even the earliest civilizations, although homosexuality was different than what we refer to as homosexuality in modern society. Every culture differed and although there is proof of homosexual activity in many ancient societies, a term that translates to roughly the meaning of “homosexual” did not exist. Despite this, there have been references to homosexuality in in most civilizations throughout history, and depending on the […]

The Ancient Egyptian Chariot

Would you feel comfortable driving in a vehicle that can tip over easily? The Ancient Egyptian chariot Is fascinating in many ways such as the importance, design, and its uses. The chariot was extremely important to Ancient Egypt. The chariot improved the Egyptians fighting methods. It created easier mobility for archers. The chariot also provided entertainment for the Ancient Egyptians. Importance from the chariot was also because it provided transportation. Chariots were also part of royalty and showed rank. The […]

Essay on Daily Life in Ancient Egypt

Did you know that a deity's gender determines whether or not he or she has a priest or priestess? Because she was a woman, Hathor, the goddess of childbirth, love, and beauty, had priestesses rather than priests. This whole study investigates how everything stems from religious concepts. This study will examine whether or not the religions of the time influenced modern society. The religion of Ancient Egypt had a significant influence on civilization. Religion was important in Ancient Egyptian culture, […]

Ancient Egyptian Art and Jewelry

Almost everything we know about ancient Egyptians we know because of what we learned from their sculptures and paintings. Egyptian art was first created to show that a king/pharaoh was a god. Pictures were carved on stone and slate, and paintings were done on walls in many colors. Egyptians also created sculptures of human and animal figures. While art showed stories and happenings, it was really not meant to be seen by the living, it was only for the afterlife […]

About an Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was a theocracy, which is a government ruled by a Pharaoh. The Pharaoh is the ruler of Ancient Egypt because they have the belief that they were sent on this earth because a god chose them. The Pharaoh was thought to be a form of a god due to having a religious belief. Ancient Egyptians government social structure in order was the Pharaoh, Vizier, Nomark, Other Officials, Scribes, and the Monarchy. The Pharaoh was the Ruler/Leader of the […]

History of Mummification

The ancient Egyptians started mummification over 4500 years ago! The embalmers, scribes, and cutter, who were all part of the process, worked for over two months to mummify the pharaohs and important people. Mummification is a crazy, but interesting idea from the process of mummification to who they decide to mummify. History of Mummification The ancient Egyptians started mummification about 3500 B.C. They believed way back then that there was an afterlife, and that important people need to be mummified […]

The Ancient Egyptian Civilization

The Ancient Egyptian civilization had lots of help from the nile river. It is rumored that the nile river is the longest river on earth. The name Nile comes from their Greek Ancestors. The first ruler Narmer also known as menes was a native Egyptian. At the time, thirty percent of the population was Greek which led to being Egyptian-Greek. There were three kingdoms; the old kingdom, the middle kingdom, and the new kingdom. Their rich history helped shape modern […]

Ancient Egyptian Society

Ancient Egypt was an era where many concepts and inventions were created. The ancient Egyptian people shaped how we utilize certain inventions today. Technology, from ancient Egypt, has impacted us greatly and without this technology, we wouldn't be as advanced as we are now. Ancient Egyptian art has influenced people for many years, even still to this today. Their style and skills inspired multiple Roman and Greek artists. Ancient Egyptian artists always remained unknown because they created art simply for […]

The Beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians

There has always been curiosity about the Ancient Egyptians. This curiosity mainly surrounds the beliefs. From what the preparations of death were to the understanding of what would happen after. The Ancient Egyptian spent a large amount of time preparing for life after death. The life of the Egyptians was centered around religion and what would face them in the afterlife. Topic 1: To sum up the beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians, it consisted of the belief that they would […]

Ancient Egyptian Boats

The Nile in Ancient Egypt was practically everything to them. They didn’t have to use extra resources for roads. Instead, they built boats and traveled the Nile. Boats were so important they also made their way into many different aspects of Egyptian mythology. The first boats were made of papyrus reeds and held together by rope made of papyrus. When they went north, they used oars. As time went on, they learned about sails to harness the wind and built […]

Heliopolis Creation Story

At first, there was nothing in the world but a vast ocean of chaos, which was named Nu. There was nothing in the world except Nu. There was no sky, no land, no up, no down, nothing. Using his pure thoughts and force of his will, Atum came to be. Atum was the first of the primordial Egyptian gods. He created a hill because there was nowhere he could stand. Now there was only Nu and Atum in the world. […]

Ancient Egyptian Foods

Egyptian culture has its origin in the Ancient Egypt which was one of the earliest origins of civilization. Ancient Egypt's leadership of Pharaohs is recorded in history has been one of the administration that was well established thus explaining its stability for about 30 centuries. These leaders have been remembered and praised for the leadership in their era (Kemp., 2006). Besides the remembrance of the rulers, ancient Egyptian culture and religion have been recognized as one of the most developed […]

A Wonderful Place Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt goes back for thousands and thousands of years, more than 5000 years ago. There were three different periods of time, the old kingdom, the middle kingdom, and the new kingdom. The old kingdom was started by king Menes who brought the lower kingdom and the upper kingdom together. He became the first pharaoh, The pharaoh was the most important person and he owned everyone and everything in egypt. Slaves and Servants were the least important people. Ancient egypt […]

The Influence of the Ancient Egyptians

According to History.com the ancient Egyptians were the superior civilization for quite a long time, which made ancient Egypt the most influential pre-industrial civilization. They had an influence on many concepts, from architecture, which is the profession of designing buildings, to agriculture, which is the production of crops, or livestock. They also had a guiding hand on warfare, which is armed conflict between two massed enemies, armies or the like. The ancient Egyptians used building techniques that were significant on […]

The Lifelines of Ancient Egypt: Exploring the Rivers that Shaped Civilization

Ancient Egypt, a cradle of human civilization, owed its prosperity, culture, and vitality to the life-giving rivers that flowed through its arid landscape. The Nile River, renowned and revered, stood as the primary source of sustenance, facilitating the growth and endurance of one of history's most influential civilizations. The Nile, often referred to as the lifeblood of Egypt, was and continues to be an indispensable element in the country's existence. Originating from the East African Great Lakes region, the Nile […]

Birthdays: a Wish for the Gods

Birthdays are celebrated to remember personal achievements, show appreciation to those we love and care for, and to simply acknowledge our existence. Although lives are measured by the ceaseless passing of time, birthdays are a time to be remembered. That is how birthdays are defined in America today. The single day that all people have to mark a time in history, celebrate youth or adulthood, highlight milestones, rites of passage, and feel recognized; it is a celebration of life. They […]

The Rise of Women in the Pre-Modern World

The importance of women in the realm of human existence is clearly essential by today’s standards. In the ancient world, societies regarded the social status of women as subordinate to men of the time. Although this is a common theme among most civilizations, the degree of treatment and regard for females varies from culture to culture. The analysis of how society treated women in ancient Egypt will reveal the prevailing affect females created on that society. Then, China’s impact during […]

Final: Cleopatra

In Act IV of William Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra remarks, "All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise" ("Cleopatra VII"). Herein lies the life of Cleopatra one fraught with tremendous challenges and marred by tragedy. Born in 69 B.C., Cleopatra VII was the daughter of King Ptolemy XII (Jones). At the age of eighteen, Cleopatra assumed the Egyptian throne (Jones). She would be the last Ptolemy and the last pharaoh to ever rule over Egypt. […]

Architectural Development through Civilizations

Since the moment mankind made the transition from being nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle, architecture became an important part of human survival. As time paced forward various civilizations conjured different architectural designs, materials, and layouts to best suit their needs as a society. Of course, as time went on so did the development of architecture. New wonders were developed, and innovative methods were used to create various structures that still stand today. Old designs have become outdated and the architectural […]

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Civilization in Ancient Egypt Essay

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The basic element of ancient civilization in Egypt besides its geography is religion. The government, literature, astronomy, medicine and arts formed their basis on religion.

It is therefore justified to say that religion was integral to the Egyptians way of life. Since the earliest beginnings of religion in Egypt, changes in religious themes, way of worship and how the worship was conducted have been observed as will be explored in this essay.

People in ancient Egypt ranging from the peasants, merchants, priests, workers, to individual kings worshipped their own gods formulated in the pre-dynastic Egypt and expressed in pictures.

Initially, animals were included in the Egyptian religious cults. That is perhaps why archeologist found preserved graves where cats, gazelles, bulls and sheep were carefully buried (Patricia 112). The worship of pictures did not last for long as they were turned into human portraits.

This, also referred to as anthropomorphism, was unique in the sense that the pictures took human form but retained an animal’s body or head. The Egyptians believed that these gods had human emotions, drank, ate, gave birth, went into battle, lived among people and died.

The reigns of these gods were believed to merge at times and in other instances overlap. In fact, their reign during this time in ancient Egypt did not have an organized hierarchy structure. The power of their gods relied on the power of the reigning king. A powerful king would imply a powerful god and so it was also with the name, location and dominance of the kings (Rosalie 1803).

Additionally, religious names were believed to be very powerful and full of mystery. For instance, in the normal society, people would die or get afflicted when certain traditional rituals were done to their names. In the same respect, certain names were used to express or describe phenomenon that were good and beneficial.

In religion, the Egyptians gave to their gods’ names that were descriptive or qualities such as majestic, virile or strong. Each god had five names and as aforementioned, was worshipped at different times, for different purposes and in different locations depending on the myth.

Examples of gods who were worshipped at that time included Ptah and Osiris the earth gods, Horus, Bat and Hathor were gods of the heaven and Amaunet, amon and Antaios were examples of gods that were worshipped depending on the location (Patricia 111).

In ancient Egypt, the kings played an integral part in religion by connecting the gods and Egyptians. Until around the third dynasty, the kings were believed to be a bridge crossing over the chasm that divided gods and men.

Besides, the priests’ roles were equally important in ancient Egypt and included reading scrolls before religious events, preparing images and statutes, caring for the image gods, and acting as voice of the oracles, stewards of granaries and temple riches and being pinnacles of decisions of their gods.

Furthermore, the ancient religion allowed the use of magic that was commonplace. Warding of evil was done through wearing of amulets, magical texts, spells, concoctions and rituals were used and their successes and their failures were attributed to the gods.

It is important to understand that the ancient religion in Egypt was centralized despite the hierarchy of deities. This indicates a sharp contrast between Egypt and Mesopotamia where in the latter, religion was decentralized. Also, the focus of Egyptian temple was for worship unlike in Sumer where it was for religious, economic and political functions.

The civilization of ancient Egypt happened at the same time Mesopotamian civilization was taking place in other areas in the nations of the Akkadians, Babylonians and the Sumerians (Rosalie 1802). Hence, most other parts of the world were also going through major revolutions in the religious spheres.

For instance, the Egyptian civilization is believed to have originated from the west and other neighboring nations as well as some internal influences. As mentioned before, civilization in ancient religious practices saw the worship of animals turned into the worship of image and pharaoh’s role as a mediator between gods and people changing to a position where he considered himself a divine being.

The rule of pharaoh which was believed to have a qualities such as righteousness, order, justice and truth brought stability and harmony which earlier on was not manifested in image worship (Oesterdiekhoff 103). Due to this and other related factors, religion created optimism, confidence and acted as a unifying factor.

It is important to note that Egyptians believed in life after death and judging by the continuous rhythmic cycle of life and death and their unchanging universe, sought to change their lifestyle in order to meet the predictable patterns of life. In this sense, they began farming, built irrigation canals and pyramids that today give a reflection of extreme centralization created by religion and which brought a significant change in Egypt.

The Hebrews also played a significant role in the civilization of ancient Egypt. The influence exerted by the Hebrews on the western intellectual tradition and the western society was so immense that affected the patterns and activities of other great institutions.

According to the Hebrews, there is only one God to whom they are committed to worship and follow his laws as stated in the Old Testament. The heroes of the Jews unlike the Egyptians were men and women and not gods and goddesses. These heroes represented both the strong and the weak men and women.

The Egyptians and the Sumerians had adopted the worship of many gods also referred to as polytheism and as mentioned earlier on, the dominance of the gods depended on the kings. The Hebrews on the other hand, believed their God was sovereign and practiced monotheism.

The Hebrews believed that the worship of idol gods that like in the case of ancient Egypt was not ideal as it represented an incapable god put in images making them less sovereign. Further, the Hebrews believed that the Egyptians could not obtain freedom from idol worship.

The arrival of the Hebrews into Egypt brought a different influence to the ancient Egyptian way of worship. Their belief system and the sovereign expression of their God in the rescue mission of the Israelites from Egypt played a key role in creating change in the religious atmosphere in Egypt (Oesterdiekhoff 108-109).

The reactions from various circles concerning civilization of ancient Egypt display a mixture of feelings. Some scholars believe that ancient Egypt before civilization was of a unique distinction. Actually, according to history, it is believed that they were the first people to create a state embodying aspiration of the Egyptian race and the spiritual beliefs in the nation-state.

The ancient state of Egypt which lasted for up to 3000 years showed a determined durability, assurance and extraordinary strength demonstrated by its framework of culture and an unmistakable purity of style. The indisputable unity that existed between culture, state and religion fell and what is seen to have remained is its peculiar geographical setting (Rosalie 1803).

Indeed, religion in ancient Egypt led to myriad of other changes that impacted the society politically, socially and economically. For instance, early developments in religion shaped the political systems and structures in ancient Egypt. Most of the rules and leadership dynamics used by Egypt rulers were largely borrowed from religion. The religiously-influenced political and social structures created other avenues and modalities on how people interacted.

The sharing of religious activities in ancient Egypt has offered the world a broad perspective in understanding early social developments in Egypt. Contemporary life would have been rather blank in terms of rich history and perhaps, it would have been cumbersome to comprehensively bridge the past and modern history on religion and worse still, connect the future history with that of the past.

Works Cited

Oesterdiekhoff, W. George. “Ancient Sun Cults: Understanding religious rites in terms of developmental psychology.” Mankind Quarterly , 48.1 (2007): 99-116.

Patricia, Spencer. “Dance in ancient Egypt.” Near Eastern Archaeology, 66.3 (2003): 111-112.

Rosalie, David. “The art of medicine: The art of healing in ancient Egypt: a scientific reappraisal.” The Lancet , 372.9652 (2008): 1802-1803.

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Bibliography

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Essay on Ancient Egypt

Students are often asked to write an essay on Ancient Egypt in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Ancient Egypt

The land of ancient egypt.

Ancient Egypt was a country in North Africa. It was near the Nile River. The Nile was very important. It gave water for drinking and growing crops. It also helped with travel and trade. The Nile made life possible in the dry desert.

Pharaohs and Gods

Pharaohs were the kings of Ancient Egypt. They were very powerful and were seen as gods. The Egyptians believed in many gods. Each god had a role, like Ra the sun god and Isis the goddess of magic.

Pyramids and Sphinx

The Egyptians built big pyramids as tombs for the pharaohs. The most famous are in Giza. There’s also a giant statue called the Sphinx. It has a lion’s body and a human’s head.

Writing and Learning

The Egyptians created a writing system called hieroglyphs. They wrote on papyrus, a type of paper. They were good at math, medicine, and astronomy. They even had a calendar.

Mummies and Afterlife

Egyptians believed in life after death. They mummified the dead to preserve them for the afterlife. Mummies are bodies wrapped in cloth. Many mummies and treasures have been found in tombs.

250 Words Essay on Ancient Egypt

Introduction.

Egypt is a country in Africa. It has a very long history. People lived there thousands of years ago. These people are called Ancient Egyptians. They are famous for many things.

The Ancient Egyptians built big stone structures called pyramids. The biggest is the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was like a tomb for a king. It is one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The leaders of Ancient Egypt were called pharaohs. They were very powerful. People believed they were gods on earth. Tutankhamun is a famous pharaoh. His tomb was found full of gold and precious things.

The Ancient Egyptians made their own kind of writing. It is called hieroglyphs. They wrote on walls and on a type of paper called papyrus. Today, people can read hieroglyphs because of a stone called the Rosetta Stone. It helped them understand the writing.

The Ancient Egyptians believed in many gods and goddesses. They thought these gods controlled everything. They even mummified dead bodies to help the soul reach the afterlife.

Ancient Egypt was a fascinating place. They had great leaders, built amazing structures, and had a rich culture. We can learn a lot about them today through their writings and the things they left behind.

500 Words Essay on Ancient Egypt

Introduction to ancient egypt.

Ancient Egypt was a grand civilization in northeastern Africa. It started around 3100 BC when Egypt’s first Pharaoh, King Narmer, ruled the land. It ended around 30 BC when the Romans took over.

Geography and Agriculture

Egypt is mostly desert, but it has a fertile area near the Nile River. This river was very important to the ancient Egyptians. They used it for drinking water, bathing, and watering their crops. The Nile also made the soil fertile, so it was good for farming. The ancient Egyptians grew wheat and flax, which they used to make bread and clothes.

Religion and Beliefs

Religion was a big part of life in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians believed in many gods and goddesses. They thought these deities controlled the natural world and human activities. For example, they believed that the sun god Ra made the sun rise and set. They also believed in life after death. They thought that when they died, they would go to a place called the afterlife. To prepare for this, they mummified their dead and placed them in tombs with food, furniture, and other things they might need.

Writing and Education

The ancient Egyptians created a form of writing called hieroglyphs. They used pictures to represent words or sounds. They wrote on papyrus, a type of paper made from a plant. Only certain people, like priests and government officials, could read and write. They went to special schools to learn these skills.

Pyramids and Architecture

The ancient Egyptians are famous for their pyramids. These huge buildings were tombs for the pharaohs and their queens. The Egyptians believed that if the pharaoh’s body was mummified and buried in a pyramid, he would live forever. The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the most well-known pyramids. It was built for Pharaoh Khufu around 2550 BC.

Science and Technology

The ancient Egyptians were great scientists and engineers. They invented the calendar that we still use today. They also knew a lot about the human body. They used this knowledge to perform complex medical procedures. For example, they could treat broken bones and wounds.

Ancient Egypt was a fascinating civilization with its own unique culture. They made many contributions to the world in areas like art, science, and architecture. Even today, we are still learning about this amazing civilization and its people. Their pyramids, hieroglyphs, and religious beliefs continue to captivate us, reminding us of a time long past but not forgotten.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Ancient Mesopotamia — Egypt Vs Mesopotamia: A Comparative Study

Egypt Vs Mesopotamia: a Comparative Study

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• Egypts Contemporary Writers That You...

Egypt's Contemporary Writers that You Need to Know

Besides boasting rich culture and history, Egypt has provided the world with brilliant writers who contributed to the greatness of Arabic literature. From the past generation’s writers – Taha Hussein, Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz and Ahdaf Soueif – to the new generation’s, Egypt has produced many impressive literature writers. Here is a list of Egypt’s contemporary writers you need to know.

Born in Mansoura in 1985, Ahmed Nagi is an Egyptian blogger, journalist, and novelist. Besides his various articles and blogs, Nagi is a journalist for a magazine named Akhbar Al-adab which translates to “ Literature News ” in English. He has also published three books – Rogers (published in Egypt in 2007 and in Italy in 2010), art criticism book Seven Lessons Learned from Ahmed Makky (published in 2009), and The Use of Life (published in 2014).

Ezzedine Choukri Fishere

This Egyptian writer, novelist, and ex-diplomat, graduated from the faculty of political science at Cairo University. He participated in the Egyptian revolution in 2011. Fishere published six novels; his first novel The Killing of Fakhreddine was published in 1995 but remained relatively unknown until 2009. His second novel Pharaonic Journeys was published in 1999. The third novel Intensive Care Unit was published in 2008 and l later became a best-seller. It was nominated for the International Prize for Arabic Booker Fiction in addition to being reprinted several times. After publishing his fourth novel Abu Omar Al-Masry in 2010, Salah Fadl, a well-known Egyptian critic said about Fishere’s four novels: “with these four novels, Fishere has entered the canon of Arabic literature.” Fishere’s fifth novel Embrace at Brooklyn Bridge , published in 2011, was also shortlisted for International Prize for Arabic Booker Fiction. The sixth novel The Exit, published in 2013, expresses the pain, the fear and the expectation of an Egyptian participating in the Egyptian revolution. The story is about a man who writes a letter to his son in 2020, explaining the struggles he has been through after the revolution and why did he decided to betray his country.

Youssef Rakha

Born in 1976 in Cairo, Youssef Rakha was a senior writer for the English-language newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly and a winner of Larkin Prize for English and Chris Ayers Prize for Philosophy. In 1990, he started contributing articles, translations and book reviews to the Arabic press. Rakha has published four novels, two of them were translated into English in 2014. The other two, Beirut, shi mahal and Amkena are travel books. His first novel, Kitab at-Tughra , won the 2015 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. The judges said it was “One of the most adventurous and innovative novels to have appeared in Arabic in recent years”. The second novel, Crocodiles , was described as “a portrait of a generation, a cosmology of Egyptian society and the human condition”. In 2009, Rakha was selected as one of the 39 authors of the Beirut39 project .

Mohammad Rabie

An Egyptian writer, Mohammad Rabie was born in 1978 and earned his degree from the Faculty of Engineering in 2002. Rabie has three novels, the first one, Amber Planet , was published in 2010 and won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award in 2011. Mohamed’s second novel is Year of Dragon , published in 2012, while the third one called Otared was published in 2015 and was shortlisted for the International Prize of Arabic Fiction in 2016.

Iman Mersal

A graduate of Mansoura University in Egypt, Iman Mersal is a famous Egyptian poet and an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern and African Studies at University of Alberta. Many of Mersal’s works have been translated into different languages including English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. She represented Egypt in different renowned poetry festivals including London Poetry Parnassus, and her works have appeared in Blackbird , The American Poetry Review , Paris Review , and Parnassus.

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9 Best Egyptian Authors of All Time

If you want to expand your literary horizons, take a look at a list of the best Egyptian authors and writers of all time.

Egypt’s powerful culture goes back thousands of years. There are numerous writers throughout the Arabic world, including Cairo and Alexandria, who have produced a wide variety of short stories, novels, and works of fiction that have had a tremendous impact on literature to this day.

A few authors from around the Nile have left their mark on the world of literature . Take a look at a few of the top Egyptian authors you need to know.

1. Ahdaf Soueif, Born 1950

2. nawal el saadawi, born 1931, 3. yusuf indris, 1927 – 1991, 4. alaa al aswany, born 1957, 5. miral al-tahawy, born 1968, 6. salwa bakr, born 1949, 7. taha hussein, 1889 – 1973, 8. tawfiq al-hakim, 1898 – 1987, 9. naguib mahfouz, 1911 – 2006, best egyptian authors ranked.

Ahdaf Soueif is one of the most popular Modern Egyptian writers. A prolific novelist and political campaigner, Soueif has become a force as an author and an activist. She was one of the leaders of the Arab Spring protests, which led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. Before this, she was a critically acclaimed novelist. Her most famous work is titled The Map of Love.

In addition to her work on this novel, she wrote extensively on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which has been going on for thousands of years. She continues to write beautifully to this day. If you would like to explore her work for yourself, you should check out The Map of Love. You might be interested in exploring other cultures across the globe, such as these incredible best Nigerian authors .

• Soueif, Ahdaf (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 544 Pages - 09/12/2000 (Publication Date) - Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Publisher)

Nawal El Saadwi is a popular female writer from Egypt. During the course of her prolific career, she has written on a variety of topics. She is also a physician, psychiatrist, and activist. She is one of the most powerful leaders who advocate for the rights of women not only in Egypt but also throughout the Arab world.

Many of her books focus on the subject of women, with two of her most popular works being Memoirs from the Women’s Prison and The Fall of the Imam. If you would like to read Saadawi’s works for yourself, take a look at The Fall of the Imam.

• Saadawi, Nawal El (Author)
• 240 Pages - 05/12/2020 (Publication Date) - Saqi Books (Publisher)

Yusuf Idris is one of the most popular Egyptian writers of all time. During the course of his prolific career, he wrote novels, plays, and even a short story or two. Similar to numerous other Egyptian authors, he did not train to be a writer when he was younger. Instead, he actually trained to be a doctor during his time at the University of Cairo. Eventually, he decided that his life would be better served in the world of literature.

Even though he has a number of marquee works, his most popular work is titled Al-Farafeer. This is a play that focuses on two characters who are completely different from each other. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature several times, and he won an award named after another Egyptian author, the Naguib Mahfouz medal, for his book titled City of Love and Ashes. Check out City of Love and Ashes.

• Idris, Yusuf (Author)
• 175 Pages - 10/22/2004 (Publication Date) - The American University in Cairo Press (Publisher)

Alaa Al Aswany is a prolific Egyptian writer. Originally from Cairo, he is the founding member of a political movement called Kefaya. Through his work and ideas, he speaks to drive changes that take place in Egypt for the benefit of everyone who lives there, including middle-class families.

Two of his most popular works include Chicago and The Yacoubian Building. His work is well-respected for his powerful use of imagery. You can take a look at the work of Al Aswany for yourself by picking up a copy of The Yacoubian Building.

• Al Aswany, Alaa (Author)
• 255 Pages - 08/01/2006 (Publication Date) - Harper Perennial (Publisher)

Miral Al-Tahawny is a popular novelist and short-story writer from Egypt. Even though she comes from a conservative background, many of her ideas are revolutionary. Her unique thoughts are reflected in her powerful works, and she is widely seen as a pioneer in the world of Arabic literature.

She is also a recipient of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. Some of her most popular works include The Tent, Blue Aubergine, and Brooklyn Heights, which takes place in New York. If you want to explore her work for yourself, you can find Brooklyn Heights.

• al-Tahawy, Miral (Author)
• 130 Pages - 09/15/2006 (Publication Date) - The American University in Cairo Press (Publisher)

Salwa Bakr is an Egyptian novelist, critic, and activist. She was born in Cairo in 1949 to a father who was a railway worker. She went on to study business at Ain Shams University, graduating in 1972. While she thought about going into the business world, she decided that her talents would be better served as a writer.

She has quickly become one of the most popular Egyptian writers of all time, with some of her most popular books including The Man from Bashmour and The Golden Chariot. If you want to read her work, you can check out The Golden Chariot.

• Used Book in Good Condition
• Hardcover Book
• Bakr, Salwa (Author)
• 328 Pages - 10/07/2007 (Publication Date) - The American University in Cairo Press (Publisher)

Taha Hussein is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He has also been called the Dean of Arabic literature. In many ways, he led a Renaissance movement in Arabic literature, and his work contributed to the modernist movement of the entire genre.

Growing up, he studied literature at Al-Azhar University. Of note, he also spent most of his life living without sight. This took place when he had an ocular procedure performed by someone without proper training. Despite this, he is still one of the most well-respected Egyptian writers of all time. One of his most popular works is called The Call of the Curlew. You can take a look at The Call of the Curlew.

• Hussein, Taha (Author)
• 111 Pages - 01/01/1997 (Publication Date) - Palm Press (Publisher)

Tawfiq Al-Hakim is an Egyptian writer who is originally from Alexandria. He is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of modern Arabic literature, and his work continues to be studied to this day. He is also widely considered to be the father of Arabic theater. In 1956, he published a play called Death Song that positioned him among the greats in the Arabic World. Some of his other popular works include Leaving Paradise, The People of the Cave, and A Bullet in the Heart.

• al-Hakim, Tawfiq (Author)
• 384 Pages - 07/09/2019 (Publication Date) - Penguin Publishing Group (Publisher)

Naguib Mahfouz is one of the top Egyptian writers of the 20th century. He also won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. He is a writer with a career that has spanned more than 70 years. He has written several plays, hundreds of short stories , and dozens of novels. During the latter part of his career, he also wrote scripts for movies.

Many of his works have had a tremendous impact on Islamic and Egyptian literary culture. Therefore, many of his books have been made into films that have been broadcast overseas. Some of his most popular works include the Cairo Trilogy, Love In The Rain, Heart of the Night, and Cairo Modern. If you would like to explore his works for yourself, you may want to take a look at the Cairo Trilogy. If you enjoyed our round-up of the best Chilean authors, we have many more articles on the best authors from around the globe. Why not check out our list of the best Turkish authors ?

• Mahfouz, Naguib (Author)
• 544 Pages - 11/29/2011 (Publication Date) - Anchor (Publisher)

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Egyptian Streets

Independent Media

Summer Read Suggestions: 11 Literary Works by Egyptian Writers

By Egyptian Streets

Egyptian literature is suffused with inspiring and thoughtful masterpieces. Nonetheless, it is quite a challenge to find contemporary Egyptian literature in English or in translation, as such, Egyptian Streets has compiled a list of 11 poems, short stories and one essay to give literature enthusiasts a taste of contemporary works from a variety of Egyptian authors. These works were mostly published in Arabic, and many in print, but they have been compiled here to give the modern reader ease of access.

1.’Solitude’ by Doria Shafik (poetry)

One of the most iconic feminists of Egyptian modern history, Doria Shafik is well-known for her political activism and advanced education. Not only was she editor in chief of Bint Al Nil (Daughter of the Nile) and La Femme Nouvelle (The Modern Woman), she also founded an Egyptian feminist organization and lead women to storm Parliament to obtain their right to vote.

It’s important to note that Shafik herself was a great translator, having translated the Quran to French and English, and was a prolific writer of fiction essays as well as poetry.

Her poetry took on a philosophical tone, which is understandable considering Shafik earned a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne. Her freestyle extensively tackles notions of love, freedom, exploration and activism.

Find her work here .

2.’The fairest faith’ by Anthony Fangary

It is crucial for Egypt’s contemporary literature scene to reflect the diverse voices which live in it. One perpetually missing voice is that of Copts in literature, whether fiction or nonfiction. Anthony Fangary, whose poetic works can be found in Anomaly, Left-Hooks, University of Iowa’s BARS, is a Coptic-Egyptian American who poignantly reflects the themes of faith, discrimination, identity and Coptic Christianity in his work.

The San-Francisco based writer’s work overflows with emotion and powerful imagery. It suffuses typical language of Egyptian Coptic culture, such as ‘orban’, ‘ezayak’ and ‘abouna’ (father) into the largely English-written poetry, also evoking local places and practices.

Find his work here .

3.’Arabs on the Beach’ by Noor Naga (essay)

A wonderful read which makes one reflects about city dwellers and desert dwellers in Egypt as well as Egyptian customs of vacationing, this essay provides a glimpse into the complicated lives of Arabs (sometimes called Bedouins) who live in the North coast of the country. The essay is replete with anthropological and historical musings with personal reflections of the author.

It tackles the subject of tribe politics, vengeance, crime and blood money all while maintaining a smooth writing style which keeps one mesmerized from start to finish.

The piece was written by Alexandrian writer Noor Nagga who admits to having lived in the United Arab Emirates for an extended time in the piece. Nagga’s work was featured in other publications such as Arc Poetry Magazine and Nashville review. Another essay of hers “Mistresses Should be Muslim Too” was published in The Walrus. Winner of  2017 Bronwen Wallace Award and the 2018 Disquiet Fiction prize, her upcoming book “The Mistress Washes Prays” will be out in spring 2020.

4. ‘Half a day’ by Naghuib Mahfouz  (short story)

One of the few iconic writers on this list who do not need an introduction, Mahfouz is Egypt’s most famous contemporary writer, most known for his ‘Cairo Trilogy’. He received a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 which many of his works having been adapted to films and TV series. His most well-known works, many of which dealing with the subjects of existentialism- he was a great enthusiast of philosophy-, Egyptian politics, and society are ‘Sugar Street’, ‘Midaq Alley’, ‘Miramar’ and ‘Palace Walk.’

His short story ‘Half a day’ explores the passage of time, bewilderment and growth.

Find the work here .

5. ‘Rythmic Exercise’ by Mohamed Makhzangi (short story)

An unusual yet captivating short story by Mohamed Makhzangi; it narrates the simple idea of a family’s quest to combat obesity and gain fitness during a time where Egypt’s sunset-to-dawn curfew was active. The family resorts to dancing and making simple exercises, latching on to any resemblance of having a normal life during times of political unrest. The story ends in a shocking twist.

Makhzangi is a Cairo-based writer who first practicing medicine before making a career shift to journalism and writing. He has published several volumes of short stories and his work has been translated in five languages. .

6. ‘The Death of His Excellency, the Ex-Minister’ by Nawal El Saadawi (short story)

A physician, psychiatrist, women’s rights activist and author, Nawal El Saadawi’s is Egypt’s most well-known contemporary feminist. A staunch criticism of female genital population and Arab patriarchy, she co-founded the Arab Association for Human Rights and founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association. Her activism has lead her to face challenges from both the government and Egypt’s religious institutions, even leading to imprisonment.

Despite this, the women’s rights advocate tackled women’s political and sexual rights outspokenly and in writing. She is dubbed as the ‘Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world’ with her most famous works being ‘Woman at Point Zero’, ‘God Dies by the Nile’, ‘Daughters of Isis’ and ‘The Hidden Face of Eve’.

Her short story ‘The Death of His Excellency, the Ex-Minister’ tells the story of a former minister who is troubled by a female activist.

7. ‘To me belongs yesterday, I know not tomorrow’ and ‘The Egyptian’ by Nashwa Gowanlock (poetry)

There are few Egyptian poems that can link the life of Egyptians today with their elements of their ancient path. One poet, Gowanlock, tackles playfully this link. A translator, journalist and writer, she holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Two wonderful poems of hers, published on Anomaly, speak of connecting to one’s roots based on the decision of adopting an Egyptian cat, and one is inspired from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

8. ‘An Edifice of the imagination’ by Hani Omar Khalil (short story)

An interesting story which attempts to capture a portrait of a young man in Tahrir, the literary piece of work captures perfectly how word of mouth travels and identity is debated in Egypt. Multiple theories about the identity of the young man, who quickly becomes iconic and famous, arise as he is claimed by different groups of Egyptians, all desiring to be associated with him. The story thus takes the reader through parallel universes and possibilities, capturing well the confusion and disarray surrounding individuals during the 2011 revolution.

It was written by Brooklyn based Hani Omar Khalil; the latter is n Egyptian-American writer, photographer and attorney whose work of fiction has appeared Corium and Epiphany.

9.’The Idea of Houses’ by Iman Mersal (poetry)

Iman Mersal is a contemporary Egyptian poet who has authored four poem books in Arabic. She is also an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Alberta.

Her poetry, which is piercing and sensible, has been published in a number of publications such as the Paris Review, American Poetry Review and the Nation. Her work tackles themes such as home, love, food, and relations.

10. ‘The Treasure’ by Youssef Idris (short story)

Another Egyptian literary whizz who does not need an introduction is Youssef Idris. The physician turned journalist also had a long career writing for Egypt’s official news outlet, Al Ahram. Throughout his life, he wrote 11 collections of short stories and nine plays which were translated into 24 languages.

Considered a master of the short story format, he sought to illustrate the lives of simple, modern-day Egyptians and villagers.

His story, ‘The Treasure’ narrates a policeman’s encounter with a forged cheque which he keeps for himself.

11.’The Open Door’ by Abdelrahman Munif (short story)

This is a  fantastic short story by one of the most prominent novelists of the Arab world, Abdelrahman Munif. The latter, author of ‘Cities of Salt’, wrote two short story collections, twelve works of non-fiction and twelve novels. Having adopted an anti-imperialist stance for years, Munif was also critical of Saudi Arabia’s regime and the war in Iraq. Many of his life experiences, namely his immigration and travels were reflected in his work.

This emotional masterpiece narrates the story of a young man due to travel away from his family and country only to find resistance from his grandmother at his decision. Bit by bit, Munif unravels a tragic backdrop story which leaves the reader to reflect on themes of family, grief and travel.

Main image courtesy of quotemaster.org

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[…] There are also writers that capture the essence of Egyptian life and identity, such as Naguib Mahfouz. If novels are too complicated,you can start with short stories and poetry that can be found here: Summer Read Suggestions: 11 Literary Works by Egyptian Writers. […]

[…] SOURCE: EGYPTIAN STREETS […]

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The Most Famous

Writers from egypt.

This page contains a list of the greatest Egyptian Writers . The pantheon dataset contains 7,302 Writers , 62 of which were born in Egypt . This makes Egypt the birth place of the 20th most number of Writers behind Hungary , and Austria .

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Egyptian Writers of all time. This list of famous Egyptian Writers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Egyptian Writers .

1. Naguib Mahfouz ( 1911 - 2006 )

With an HPI of 74.38 , Naguib Mahfouz is the most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 135 different languages on wikipedia.

Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha (Arabic: نجيب محفوظ عبد العزيز ابراهيم احمد الباشا, IPA: [næˈɡiːb mɑħˈfuːzˤ]; 11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mahfouz is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers in Arabic literature, along with Taha Hussein, to explore themes of existentialism. He is the only Egyptian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published 35 novels, over 350 short stories, 26 screenplays, hundreds of op-ed columns for Egyptian newspapers, and seven plays over a 70-year career, from the 1930s until 2004. All of his novels take place in Egypt, and always mentions the lane, which equals the world. His most famous works include The Cairo Trilogy and Children of Gebelawi. Many of Mahfouz's works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films; no Arab writer exceeds Mahfouz in number of works that have been adapted for cinema and television. While Mahfouz's literature is classified as realist literature, existential themes appear in it. Naguib Mahfouz's literary career is intertwined with the history of the modern novel in Egypt and the Arab world. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Arabic novel took its first steps in a society and culture that discovered this literary genre through the translation of European novels from the nineteenth century. However, for Naguib Mahfouz, a society as strong and ancient as Egyptian society, having preserved ancient traditions while modernizing, could absorb and incorporate, without fear, some aspects of Western culture. Because this writer listened, above all, in his work, to this Egyptian people, to their intimate adventures and their history. Naguib Mahfouz's novels are characterized by a classic narrative style, characterized by a focus on portraying characters and situations in a very realistic way, with an emphasis on customs, traditions, and social values in Egyptian society, and the accurate embodiment of daily life in Egypt. Naguib Mahfouz also uses the style of the internal novel, which allows the reader to view the world through the eyes of a central character in the novel. Naguib Mahfouz's style is also characterized by manipulating time and focusing on the changes that occur in events and people over time.

2 . Sayyid Qutb ( 1906 - 1966 )

With an HPI of 70.36 , Sayyid Qutb is the 2nd most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 47 different languages.

Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Qutb ( or ; Egyptian Arabic: [ˈsæjjed ˈʔotˤb]; Arabic: سيد قطب إبراهيم حسين, romanized: Sayyid 'Ibrāhīm Ḥusayn Quṭb; 9 October 1906 – 29 August 1966) was an Egyptian Islamic scholar, revolutionary, poet, and a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, he was convicted of plotting the assassination of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and was executed by hanging. He is considered as "the Father of Salafi jihadism", the religio-political doctrine that underpins the ideological roots of global jihadist organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIL. Author of 24 books, with around 30 books unpublished for different reasons (mainly destruction by the state), and at least 581 articles, including novels, literary arts critique and works on education, he is best known in the Muslim world for his work on what he believed to be the social and political role of Islam, particularly in his books Social Justice and Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones). His magnum opus, Fi Zilal al-Quran (In the Shade of the Qur'an), is a 30-volume commentary on the Quran. During most of his life, Qutb's inner circle mainly consisted of influential politicians, intellectuals, poets and literary figures, both of his age and of the preceding generation. By the mid-1940s, many of his writings were included in the curricula of schools, colleges and universities. Even though most of his observations and criticism were leveled at the Muslim world, Qutb also intensely disapproved of the society and culture of the United States, which he saw as materialistic, and obsessed with violence and sexual pleasures. He advocated violent, offensive jihad. Qutb has been described by followers as a great thinker and martyr for Islam, while many Western observers (and some Muslims) see him as a key originator of Islamist ideology, and an inspiration for violent Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda. Qutb is widely regarded as one of the most leading Islamist ideologues of the twentieth century. Strengthened by his status as a martyr, Qutb's ideas on Jahiliyya and his close linking of implementation of Shari'ah (Islamic Law) with Tawhid (Islamic monotheism) has highly influenced contemporary Islamist and Jihadist movements. Today, his supporters are identified by their opponents as "Qutbists" or "Qutbi".

3 . Appian ( 95 - 165 )

With an HPI of 70.13 , Appian is the 3rd most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 56 different languages.

Appian of Alexandria (; Greek: Ἀππιανὸς Ἀλεξανδρεύς, translit. Appianòs Alexandreús; Latin: Appianus Alexandrinus; c. 95 – c. AD 165) was a Greek historian with Roman citizenship who prospered during the reigns of Emperors of Rome Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius. He was born c. 95 in Alexandria. After holding the senior offices in the province of Aegyptus (Egypt), he went to Rome c. 120, where he practised as an advocate, pleading cases before the emperors (probably as advocatus fisci, an important official of the imperial treasury). It was in 147 at the earliest that he was appointed to the office of procurator, probably in Egypt, on the recommendation of his friend Marcus Cornelius Fronto, an influential rhetorician and advocate. Because the position of procurator was open only to members of the equestrian order (the "knightly" class), his possession of this office tells us about Appian's family background. His principal surviving work (Ρωμαϊκά Romaiká, known in Latin as Historia Romana and in English as Roman History) was written in Greek in 24 books, before 165. This work more closely resembles a series of monographs than a connected history. It gives an account of various peoples and countries from the earliest times down to their incorporation into the Roman Empire, and survives in complete books and considerable fragments. The work is very valuable, especially for the period of the civil wars. The Civil Wars, books 13–17 of the Roman History, concern mainly the end of the Roman Republic and take a conflict-based view and approach to history. Despite the lack of cited sources for his works, these books of the Roman History are the only extant comprehensive description of these momentous decades of Roman history. The other extant work of Appian is his "The Foreign Wars", which includes an ethnographic style history recounting the various military conflicts against a foreign enemy in Roman history, until the time of Appian.

4 . Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ( 1876 - 1944 )

With an HPI of 69.88 , Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is the 4th most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 51 different languages.

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (Italian: [fiˈlippo tomˈmaːzo mariˈnetti]; 22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the Manifesto of Futurism, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.

5 . Apollonius of Rhodes ( -295 - -215 )

With an HPI of 69.32 , Apollonius of Rhodes is the 5th most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 51 different languages.

Apollonius of Rhodes (Ancient Greek: Ἀπολλώνιος Ῥόδιος Apollṓnios Rhódios; Latin: Apollonius Rhodius; fl. first half of 3rd century BC) was an ancient Greek author, best known for the Argonautica, an epic poem about Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece. The poem is one of the few extant examples of the epic genre and it was both innovative and influential, providing Ptolemaic Egypt with a "cultural mnemonic" or national "archive of images", and offering the Latin poets Virgil and Gaius Valerius Flaccus a model for their own epics. His other poems, which survive only in small fragments, concerned the beginnings or foundations of cities, such as Alexandria and Cnidus places of interest to the Ptolemies, whom he served as a scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria. A literary dispute with Callimachus, another Alexandrian librarian/poet, is a topic much discussed by modern scholars since it is thought to give some insight into their poetry, although there is very little evidence that there ever was such a dispute between the two men. In fact almost nothing at all is known about Apollonius and even his connection with Rhodes is a matter for speculation. Once considered a mere imitator of Homer, and therefore a failure as a poet, his reputation has been enhanced by recent studies, with an emphasis on the special characteristics of Hellenistic poets as scholarly heirs of a long literary tradition writing at a unique time in history.

6 . Lactantius ( 250 - 325 )

With an HPI of 68.11 , Lactantius is the 6th most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 44 different languages.

Lucius Caecilius Firmianus signo Lactantius (c. 250 – c. 325) was an early Christian author who became an advisor to Roman emperor Constantine I, guiding his Christian religious policy in its initial stages of emergence, and a tutor to his son Crispus. His most important work is the Institutiones Divinae ("The Divine Institutes"), an apologetic treatise intended to establish the reasonableness and truth of Christianity to pagan critics. He is best known for his apologetic works, widely read during the Renaissance by humanists, who called Lactantius the "Christian Cicero". Also often attributed to Lactantius is the poem The Phoenix, which is based on the myth of the phoenix from Egypt and Arabia. Though the poem is not clearly Christian in its motifs, modern scholars have found some literary evidence in the text to suggest the author had a Christian interpretation of the eastern myth as a symbol of resurrection.

7 . Constantine P. Cavafy ( 1863 - 1933 )

With an HPI of 68.11 , Constantine P. Cavafy is the 7th most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 53 different languages.

Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Πέτρου Καβάφης [ka'vafis]; April 29 (April 17, OS), 1863 – April 29, 1933), known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy (), was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. A major figure of modern Greek literature, he is sometimes considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. His works and consciously individual style earned him a place among the most important contributors not only to Greek poetry, but to Western poetry as a whole. Cavafy's poetic canon consists of 154 poems, while dozens more that remained incomplete or in sketch form weren't published until much later. He consistently refused to publish his work in books, preferring to share it through local newspapers and magazines, or even print it himself and give it away to anyone who might be interested. His most important poems were written after his fortieth birthday, and were published two years after his death. Cavafy's work has been translated numerous times in many languages. His friend E. M. Forster, the novelist and literary critic, first introduced his poems to the English-speaking world in 1923; he referred to him as "The Poet", famously describing him as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." His work, as one translator put it, "holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace."

8 . Athenaeus ( 200 - 223 )

With an HPI of 67.38 , Athenaeus is the 8th most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 44 different languages.

Athenaeus of Naucratis (; Ancient Greek: Ἀθήναιος ὁ Nαυκρατίτης or Nαυκράτιος, Athēnaios Naukratitēs or Naukratios; Latin: Athenaeus Naucratita) was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD. The Suda says only that he lived in the times of Marcus Aurelius, but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus, who died in 192, implies that he survived that emperor. He was a contemporary of Adrantus. Athenaeus himself states that he was the author of a treatise on the thratta, a kind of fish mentioned by Archippus and other comic poets, and of a history of the Syrian kings. Both works are lost. Of his works, only the fifteen-volume Deipnosophistae mostly survives.

9 . Claudian ( 370 - 404 )

With an HPI of 64.50 , Claudian is the 9th most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 40 different languages.

Claudius Claudianus, known in English as Claudian (Greek: Κλαυδιανός; c. 370 – c. 404 AD), was a Latin poet associated with the court of the Roman emperor Honorius at Mediolanum (Milan), and particularly with the general Stilicho. His work, written almost entirely in hexameters or elegiac couplets, falls into three main categories: poems for Honorius, poems for Stilicho, and mythological epic.

10 . Nonnus ( 500 - 500 )

With an HPI of 64.14 , Nonnus is the 10th most famous Egyptian Writer .   His biography has been translated into 33 different languages.

Nonnus of Panopolis (Greek: Νόννος ὁ Πανοπολίτης, Nónnos ho Panopolítēs, fl. 5th century CE) was the most notable Greek epic poet of the Imperial Roman era. He was a native of Panopolis (Akhmim) in the Egyptian Thebaid and probably lived in the 5th century CE. He is known as the composer of the Dionysiaca, an epic tale of the god Dionysus, and of the Metabole, a paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The epic Dionysiaca describes the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India, and his triumphant return. It was written in Homeric Greek and in dactylic hexameter, and it consists of 48 books at 20,426 lines.

Pantheon has 62 people classified as Egyptian writers born between 300 BC and 1967 . Of these 62 , 8 ( 12.90% ) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Egyptian writers include André Aciman , Bat Ye'or , and Alaa Al Aswany . The most famous deceased Egyptian writers include Naguib Mahfouz , Sayyid Qutb , and Appian . As of April 2024, 1 new Egyptian writers have been added to Pantheon including Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi .

Living Egyptian Writers

André Aciman

1951 - Present

Bat Ye'or

1933 - Present

Alaa Al Aswany

1957 - Present

Magdi Allam

1952 - Present

Karim Rashid

1960 - Present

Penelope Lively

Leila Aboulela

1964 - Present

Mona Eltahawy

1967 - Present

Deceased Egyptian Writers

Naguib mahfouz.

1911 - 2006

Sayyid Qutb

1906 - 1966

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

1876 - 1944

Apollonius of Rhodes

295 BC - 215 BC

Constantine P. Cavafy

1863 - 1933

Taha Hussein

1889 - 1973

Pope Dionysius of Alexandria

Newly added egyptian writers (2024).

Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi

1892 - 1955

Overlapping Lives

Which Writers were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 25 most globally memorable Writers since 1700.

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• Open access
• Published: 03 June 2024

Applying large language models for automated essay scoring for non-native Japanese

• Wenchao Li 1 &
• Haitao Liu 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  723 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Language and linguistics

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to an increased use of large language models (LLMs) for language assessment tasks such as automated essay scoring (AES), automated listening tests, and automated oral proficiency assessments. The application of LLMs for AES in the context of non-native Japanese, however, remains limited. This study explores the potential of LLM-based AES by comparing the efficiency of different models, i.e. two conventional machine training technology-based methods (Jess and JWriter), two LLMs (GPT and BERT), and one Japanese local LLM (Open-Calm large model). To conduct the evaluation, a dataset consisting of 1400 story-writing scripts authored by learners with 12 different first languages was used. Statistical analysis revealed that GPT-4 outperforms Jess and JWriter, BERT, and the Japanese language-specific trained Open-Calm large model in terms of annotation accuracy and predicting learning levels. Furthermore, by comparing 18 different models that utilize various prompts, the study emphasized the significance of prompts in achieving accurate and reliable evaluations using LLMs.

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Conventional machine learning technology in aes.

AES has experienced significant growth with the advancement of machine learning technologies in recent decades. In the earlier stages of AES development, conventional machine learning-based approaches were commonly used. These approaches involved the following procedures: a) feeding the machine with a dataset. In this step, a dataset of essays is provided to the machine learning system. The dataset serves as the basis for training the model and establishing patterns and correlations between linguistic features and human ratings. b) the machine learning model is trained using linguistic features that best represent human ratings and can effectively discriminate learners’ writing proficiency. These features include lexical richness (Lu, 2012 ; Kyle and Crossley, 2015 ; Kyle et al. 2021 ), syntactic complexity (Lu, 2010 ; Liu, 2008 ), text cohesion (Crossley and McNamara, 2016 ), and among others. Conventional machine learning approaches in AES require human intervention, such as manual correction and annotation of essays. This human involvement was necessary to create a labeled dataset for training the model. Several AES systems have been developed using conventional machine learning technologies. These include the Intelligent Essay Assessor (Landauer et al. 2003 ), the e-rater engine by Educational Testing Service (Attali and Burstein, 2006 ; Burstein, 2003 ), MyAccess with the InterlliMetric scoring engine by Vantage Learning (Elliot, 2003 ), and the Bayesian Essay Test Scoring system (Rudner and Liang, 2002 ). These systems have played a significant role in automating the essay scoring process and providing quick and consistent feedback to learners. However, as touched upon earlier, conventional machine learning approaches rely on predetermined linguistic features and often require manual intervention, making them less flexible and potentially limiting their generalizability to different contexts.

In the context of the Japanese language, conventional machine learning-incorporated AES tools include Jess (Ishioka and Kameda, 2006 ) and JWriter (Lee and Hasebe, 2017 ). Jess assesses essays by deducting points from the perfect score, utilizing the Mainichi Daily News newspaper as a database. The evaluation criteria employed by Jess encompass various aspects, such as rhetorical elements (e.g., reading comprehension, vocabulary diversity, percentage of complex words, and percentage of passive sentences), organizational structures (e.g., forward and reverse connection structures), and content analysis (e.g., latent semantic indexing). JWriter employs linear regression analysis to assign weights to various measurement indices, such as average sentence length and total number of characters. These weights are then combined to derive the overall score. A pilot study involving the Jess model was conducted on 1320 essays at different proficiency levels, including primary, intermediate, and advanced. However, the results indicated that the Jess model failed to significantly distinguish between these essay levels. Out of the 16 measures used, four measures, namely median sentence length, median clause length, median number of phrases, and maximum number of phrases, did not show statistically significant differences between the levels. Additionally, two measures exhibited between-level differences but lacked linear progression: the number of attributives declined words and the Kanji/kana ratio. On the other hand, the remaining measures, including maximum sentence length, maximum clause length, number of attributive conjugated words, maximum number of consecutive infinitive forms, maximum number of conjunctive-particle clauses, k characteristic value, percentage of big words, and percentage of passive sentences, demonstrated statistically significant between-level differences and displayed linear progression.

Both Jess and JWriter exhibit notable limitations, including the manual selection of feature parameters and weights, which can introduce biases into the scoring process. The reliance on human annotators to label non-native language essays also introduces potential noise and variability in the scoring. Furthermore, an important concern is the possibility of system manipulation and cheating by learners who are aware of the regression equation utilized by the models (Hirao et al. 2020 ). These limitations emphasize the need for further advancements in AES systems to address these challenges.

Deep learning technology in AES

Deep learning has emerged as one of the approaches for improving the accuracy and effectiveness of AES. Deep learning-based AES methods utilize artificial neural networks that mimic the human brain’s functioning through layered algorithms and computational units. Unlike conventional machine learning, deep learning autonomously learns from the environment and past errors without human intervention. This enables deep learning models to establish nonlinear correlations, resulting in higher accuracy. Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the development of transformers, which are particularly effective in learning text representations. Noteworthy examples include bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) (Devlin et al. 2019 ) and the generative pretrained transformer (GPT) (OpenAI).

BERT is a linguistic representation model that utilizes a transformer architecture and is trained on two tasks: masked linguistic modeling and next-sentence prediction (Hirao et al. 2020 ; Vaswani et al. 2017 ). In the context of AES, BERT follows specific procedures, as illustrated in Fig. 1 : (a) the tokenized prompts and essays are taken as input; (b) special tokens, such as [CLS] and [SEP], are added to mark the beginning and separation of prompts and essays; (c) the transformer encoder processes the prompt and essay sequences, resulting in hidden layer sequences; (d) the hidden layers corresponding to the [CLS] tokens (T[CLS]) represent distributed representations of the prompts and essays; and (e) a multilayer perceptron uses these distributed representations as input to obtain the final score (Hirao et al. 2020 ).

AES system with BERT (Hirao et al. 2020 ).

The training of BERT using a substantial amount of sentence data through the Masked Language Model (MLM) allows it to capture contextual information within the hidden layers. Consequently, BERT is expected to be capable of identifying artificial essays as invalid and assigning them lower scores (Mizumoto and Eguchi, 2023 ). In the context of AES for nonnative Japanese learners, Hirao et al. ( 2020 ) combined the long short-term memory (LSTM) model proposed by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber ( 1997 ) with BERT to develop a tailored automated Essay Scoring System. The findings of their study revealed that the BERT model outperformed both the conventional machine learning approach utilizing character-type features such as “kanji” and “hiragana”, as well as the standalone LSTM model. Takeuchi et al. ( 2021 ) presented an approach to Japanese AES that eliminates the requirement for pre-scored essays by relying solely on reference texts or a model answer for the essay task. They investigated multiple similarity evaluation methods, including frequency of morphemes, idf values calculated on Wikipedia, LSI, LDA, word-embedding vectors, and document vectors produced by BERT. The experimental findings revealed that the method utilizing the frequency of morphemes with idf values exhibited the strongest correlation with human-annotated scores across different essay tasks. The utilization of BERT in AES encounters several limitations. Firstly, essays often exceed the model’s maximum length limit. Second, only score labels are available for training, which restricts access to additional information.

Mizumoto and Eguchi ( 2023 ) were pioneers in employing the GPT model for AES in non-native English writing. Their study focused on evaluating the accuracy and reliability of AES using the GPT-3 text-davinci-003 model, analyzing a dataset of 12,100 essays from the corpus of nonnative written English (TOEFL11). The findings indicated that AES utilizing the GPT-3 model exhibited a certain degree of accuracy and reliability. They suggest that GPT-3-based AES systems hold the potential to provide support for human ratings. However, applying GPT model to AES presents a unique natural language processing (NLP) task that involves considerations such as nonnative language proficiency, the influence of the learner’s first language on the output in the target language, and identifying linguistic features that best indicate writing quality in a specific language. These linguistic features may differ morphologically or syntactically from those present in the learners’ first language, as observed in (1)–(3).

我-送了-他-一本-书

Wǒ-sòngle-tā-yī běn-shū

1 sg .-give. past- him-one .cl- book

“I gave him a book.”

Agglutinative

彼-に-本-を-あげ-まし-た

Kare-ni-hon-o-age-mashi-ta

3 sg .- dat -hon- acc- give.honorification. past

Inflectional

give, give-s, gave, given, giving

Additionally, the morphological agglutination and subject-object-verb (SOV) order in Japanese, along with its idiomatic expressions, pose additional challenges for applying language models in AES tasks (4).

足-が 棒-に なり-ました

Ashi-ga bo-ni nar-mashita

leg- nom stick- dat become- past

“My leg became like a stick (I am extremely tired).”

The example sentence provided demonstrates the morpho-syntactic structure of Japanese and the presence of an idiomatic expression. In this sentence, the verb “なる” (naru), meaning “to become”, appears at the end of the sentence. The verb stem “なり” (nari) is attached with morphemes indicating honorification (“ます” - mashu) and tense (“た” - ta), showcasing agglutination. While the sentence can be literally translated as “my leg became like a stick”, it carries an idiomatic interpretation that implies “I am extremely tired”.

To overcome this issue, CyberAgent Inc. ( 2023 ) has developed the Open-Calm series of language models specifically designed for Japanese. Open-Calm consists of pre-trained models available in various sizes, such as Small, Medium, Large, and 7b. Figure 2 depicts the fundamental structure of the Open-Calm model. A key feature of this architecture is the incorporation of the Lora Adapter and GPT-NeoX frameworks, which can enhance its language processing capabilities.

GPT-NeoX Model Architecture (Okgetheng and Takeuchi 2024 ).

In a recent study conducted by Okgetheng and Takeuchi ( 2024 ), they assessed the efficacy of Open-Calm language models in grading Japanese essays. The research utilized a dataset of approximately 300 essays, which were annotated by native Japanese educators. The findings of the study demonstrate the considerable potential of Open-Calm language models in automated Japanese essay scoring. Specifically, among the Open-Calm family, the Open-Calm Large model (referred to as OCLL) exhibited the highest performance. However, it is important to note that, as of the current date, the Open-Calm Large model does not offer public access to its server. Consequently, users are required to independently deploy and operate the environment for OCLL. In order to utilize OCLL, users must have a PC equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (8 or 12 GB VRAM).

In summary, while the potential of LLMs in automated scoring of nonnative Japanese essays has been demonstrated in two studies—BERT-driven AES (Hirao et al. 2020 ) and OCLL-based AES (Okgetheng and Takeuchi, 2024 )—the number of research efforts in this area remains limited.

Another significant challenge in applying LLMs to AES lies in prompt engineering and ensuring its reliability and effectiveness (Brown et al. 2020 ; Rae et al. 2021 ; Zhang et al. 2021 ). Various prompting strategies have been proposed, such as the zero-shot chain of thought (CoT) approach (Kojima et al. 2022 ), which involves manually crafting diverse and effective examples. However, manual efforts can lead to mistakes. To address this, Zhang et al. ( 2021 ) introduced an automatic CoT prompting method called Auto-CoT, which demonstrates matching or superior performance compared to the CoT paradigm. Another prompt framework is trees of thoughts, enabling a model to self-evaluate its progress at intermediate stages of problem-solving through deliberate reasoning (Yao et al. 2023 ).

Beyond linguistic studies, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of foreign workers in Japan and Japanese learners worldwide (Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare of Japan, 2022 ; Japan Foundation, 2021 ). However, existing assessment methods, such as the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), J-CAT, and TTBJ Footnote 1 , primarily focus on reading, listening, vocabulary, and grammar skills, neglecting the evaluation of writing proficiency. As the number of workers and language learners continues to grow, there is a rising demand for an efficient AES system that can reduce costs and time for raters and be utilized for employment, examinations, and self-study purposes.

This study aims to explore the potential of LLM-based AES by comparing the effectiveness of five models: two LLMs (GPT Footnote 2 and BERT), one Japanese local LLM (OCLL), and two conventional machine learning-based methods (linguistic feature-based scoring tools - Jess and JWriter).

The research questions addressed in this study are as follows:

To what extent do the LLM-driven AES and linguistic feature-based AES, when used as automated tools to support human rating, accurately reflect test takers’ actual performance?

What influence does the prompt have on the accuracy and performance of LLM-based AES methods?

The subsequent sections of the manuscript cover the methodology, including the assessment measures for nonnative Japanese writing proficiency, criteria for prompts, and the dataset. The evaluation section focuses on the analysis of annotations and rating scores generated by LLM-driven and linguistic feature-based AES methods.

Methodology

The dataset utilized in this study was obtained from the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS) Footnote 3 . This corpus consisted of 1000 participants who represented 12 different first languages. For the study, the participants were given a story-writing task on a personal computer. They were required to write two stories based on the 4-panel illustrations titled “Picnic” and “The key” (see Appendix A). Background information for the participants was provided by the corpus, including their Japanese language proficiency levels assessed through two online tests: J-CAT and SPOT. These tests evaluated their reading, listening, vocabulary, and grammar abilities. The learners’ proficiency levels were categorized into six levels aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and the Reference Framework for Japanese Language Education (RFJLE): A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2. According to Lee et al. ( 2015 ), there is a high level of agreement (r = 0.86) between the J-CAT and SPOT assessments, indicating that the proficiency certifications provided by J-CAT are consistent with those of SPOT. However, it is important to note that the scores of J-CAT and SPOT do not have a one-to-one correspondence. In this study, the J-CAT scores were used as a benchmark to differentiate learners of different proficiency levels. A total of 1400 essays were utilized, representing the beginner (aligned with A1), A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2 levels based on the J-CAT scores. Table 1 provides information about the learners’ proficiency levels and their corresponding J-CAT and SPOT scores.

A dataset comprising a total of 1400 essays from the story writing tasks was collected. Among these, 714 essays were utilized to evaluate the reliability of the LLM-based AES method, while the remaining 686 essays were designated as development data to assess the LLM-based AES’s capability to distinguish participants with varying proficiency levels. The GPT 4 API was used in this study. A detailed explanation of the prompt-assessment criteria is provided in Section Prompt . All essays were sent to the model for measurement and scoring.

Measures of writing proficiency for nonnative Japanese

Japanese exhibits a morphologically agglutinative structure where morphemes are attached to the word stem to convey grammatical functions such as tense, aspect, voice, and honorifics, e.g. (5).

食べ-させ-られ-まし-た-か

tabe-sase-rare-mashi-ta-ka

[eat (stem)-causative-passive voice-honorification-tense. past-question marker]

Japanese employs nine case particles to indicate grammatical functions: the nominative case particle が (ga), the accusative case particle を (o), the genitive case particle の (no), the dative case particle に (ni), the locative/instrumental case particle で (de), the ablative case particle から (kara), the directional case particle へ (e), and the comitative case particle と (to). The agglutinative nature of the language, combined with the case particle system, provides an efficient means of distinguishing between active and passive voice, either through morphemes or case particles, e.g. 食べる taberu “eat concusive . ” (active voice); 食べられる taberareru “eat concusive . ” (passive voice). In the active voice, “パン を 食べる” (pan o taberu) translates to “to eat bread”. On the other hand, in the passive voice, it becomes “パン が 食べられた” (pan ga taberareta), which means “(the) bread was eaten”. Additionally, it is important to note that different conjugations of the same lemma are considered as one type in order to ensure a comprehensive assessment of the language features. For example, e.g., 食べる taberu “eat concusive . ”; 食べている tabeteiru “eat progress .”; 食べた tabeta “eat past . ” as one type.

To incorporate these features, previous research (Suzuki, 1999 ; Watanabe et al. 1988 ; Ishioka, 2001 ; Ishioka and Kameda, 2006 ; Hirao et al. 2020 ) has identified complexity, fluency, and accuracy as crucial factors for evaluating writing quality. These criteria are assessed through various aspects, including lexical richness (lexical density, diversity, and sophistication), syntactic complexity, and cohesion (Kyle et al. 2021 ; Mizumoto and Eguchi, 2023 ; Ure, 1971 ; Halliday, 1985 ; Barkaoui and Hadidi, 2020 ; Zenker and Kyle, 2021 ; Kim et al. 2018 ; Lu, 2017 ; Ortega, 2015 ). Therefore, this study proposes five scoring categories: lexical richness, syntactic complexity, cohesion, content elaboration, and grammatical accuracy. A total of 16 measures were employed to capture these categories. The calculation process and specific details of these measures can be found in Table 2 .

T-unit, first introduced by Hunt ( 1966 ), is a measure used for evaluating speech and composition. It serves as an indicator of syntactic development and represents the shortest units into which a piece of discourse can be divided without leaving any sentence fragments. In the context of Japanese language assessment, Sakoda and Hosoi ( 2020 ) utilized T-unit as the basic unit to assess the accuracy and complexity of Japanese learners’ speaking and storytelling. The calculation of T-units in Japanese follows the following principles:

A single main clause constitutes 1 T-unit, regardless of the presence or absence of dependent clauses, e.g. (6).

ケンとマリはピクニックに行きました (main clause): 1 T-unit.

If a sentence contains a main clause along with subclauses, each subclause is considered part of the same T-unit, e.g. (7).

天気が良かった の で (subclause)、ケンとマリはピクニックに行きました (main clause): 1 T-unit.

In the case of coordinate clauses, where multiple clauses are connected, each coordinated clause is counted separately. Thus, a sentence with coordinate clauses may have 2 T-units or more, e.g. (8).

ケンは地図で場所を探して (coordinate clause)、マリはサンドイッチを作りました (coordinate clause): 2 T-units.

Lexical diversity refers to the range of words used within a text (Engber, 1995 ; Kyle et al. 2021 ) and is considered a useful measure of the breadth of vocabulary in L n production (Jarvis, 2013a , 2013b ).

The type/token ratio (TTR) is widely recognized as a straightforward measure for calculating lexical diversity and has been employed in numerous studies. These studies have demonstrated a strong correlation between TTR and other methods of measuring lexical diversity (e.g., Bentz et al. 2016 ; Čech and Miroslav, 2018 ; Çöltekin and Taraka, 2018 ). TTR is computed by considering both the number of unique words (types) and the total number of words (tokens) in a given text. Given that the length of learners’ writing texts can vary, this study employs the moving average type-token ratio (MATTR) to mitigate the influence of text length. MATTR is calculated using a 50-word moving window. Initially, a TTR is determined for words 1–50 in an essay, followed by words 2–51, 3–52, and so on until the end of the essay is reached (Díez-Ortega and Kyle, 2023 ). The final MATTR scores were obtained by averaging the TTR scores for all 50-word windows. The following formula was employed to derive MATTR:

\({\rm{MATTR}}({\rm{W}})=\frac{{\sum }_{{\rm{i}}=1}^{{\rm{N}}-{\rm{W}}+1}{{\rm{F}}}_{{\rm{i}}}}{{\rm{W}}({\rm{N}}-{\rm{W}}+1)}\)

Here, N refers to the number of tokens in the corpus. W is the randomly selected token size (W < N). \({F}_{i}\) is the number of types in each window. The \({\rm{MATTR}}({\rm{W}})\) is the mean of a series of type-token ratios (TTRs) based on the word form for all windows. It is expected that individuals with higher language proficiency will produce texts with greater lexical diversity, as indicated by higher MATTR scores.

Lexical density was captured by the ratio of the number of lexical words to the total number of words (Lu, 2012 ). Lexical sophistication refers to the utilization of advanced vocabulary, often evaluated through word frequency indices (Crossley et al. 2013 ; Haberman, 2008 ; Kyle and Crossley, 2015 ; Laufer and Nation, 1995 ; Lu, 2012 ; Read, 2000 ). In line of writing, lexical sophistication can be interpreted as vocabulary breadth, which entails the appropriate usage of vocabulary items across various lexicon-grammatical contexts and registers (Garner et al. 2019 ; Kim et al. 2018 ; Kyle et al. 2018 ). In Japanese specifically, words are considered lexically sophisticated if they are not included in the “Japanese Education Vocabulary List Ver 1.0”. Footnote 4 Consequently, lexical sophistication was calculated by determining the number of sophisticated word types relative to the total number of words per essay. Furthermore, it has been suggested that, in Japanese writing, sentences should ideally have a length of no more than 40 to 50 characters, as this promotes readability. Therefore, the median and maximum sentence length can be considered as useful indices for assessment (Ishioka and Kameda, 2006 ).

Syntactic complexity was assessed based on several measures, including the mean length of clauses, verb phrases per T-unit, clauses per T-unit, dependent clauses per T-unit, complex nominals per clause, adverbial clauses per clause, coordinate phrases per clause, and mean dependency distance (MDD). The MDD reflects the distance between the governor and dependent positions in a sentence. A larger dependency distance indicates a higher cognitive load and greater complexity in syntactic processing (Liu, 2008 ; Liu et al. 2017 ). The MDD has been established as an efficient metric for measuring syntactic complexity (Jiang, Quyang, and Liu, 2019 ; Li and Yan, 2021 ). To calculate the MDD, the position numbers of the governor and dependent are subtracted, assuming that words in a sentence are assigned in a linear order, such as W1 … Wi … Wn. In any dependency relationship between words Wa and Wb, Wa is the governor and Wb is the dependent. The MDD of the entire sentence was obtained by taking the absolute value of governor – dependent:

MDD = \(\frac{1}{n}{\sum }_{i=1}^{n}|{\rm{D}}{{\rm{D}}}_{i}|\)

In this formula, \(n\) represents the number of words in the sentence, and \({DD}i\) is the dependency distance of the \({i}^{{th}}\) dependency relationship of a sentence. Building on this, the annotation of sentence ‘Mary-ga-John-ni-keshigomu-o-watashita was [Mary- top -John- dat -eraser- acc -give- past] ’. The sentence’s MDD would be 2. Table 3 provides the CSV file as a prompt for GPT 4.

Cohesion (semantic similarity) and content elaboration aim to capture the ideas presented in test taker’s essays. Cohesion was assessed using three measures: Synonym overlap/paragraph (topic), Synonym overlap/paragraph (keywords), and word2vec cosine similarity. Content elaboration and development were measured as the number of metadiscourse markers (type)/number of words. To capture content closely, this study proposed a novel-distance based representation, by encoding the cosine distance between the essay (by learner) and essay task’s (topic and keyword) i -vectors. The learner’s essay is decoded into a word sequence, and aligned to the essay task’ topic and keyword for log-likelihood measurement. The cosine distance reveals the content elaboration score in the leaners’ essay. The mathematical equation of cosine similarity between target-reference vectors is shown in (11), assuming there are i essays and ( L i , …. L n ) and ( N i , …. N n ) are the vectors representing the learner and task’s topic and keyword respectively. The content elaboration distance between L i and N i was calculated as follows:

\(\cos \left(\theta \right)=\frac{{\rm{L}}\,\cdot\, {\rm{N}}}{\left|{\rm{L}}\right|{\rm{|N|}}}=\frac{\mathop{\sum }\nolimits_{i=1}^{n}{L}_{i}{N}_{i}}{\sqrt{\mathop{\sum }\nolimits_{i=1}^{n}{L}_{i}^{2}}\sqrt{\mathop{\sum }\nolimits_{i=1}^{n}{N}_{i}^{2}}}\)

A high similarity value indicates a low difference between the two recognition outcomes, which in turn suggests a high level of proficiency in content elaboration.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed measures in distinguishing different proficiency levels among nonnative Japanese speakers’ writing, we conducted a multi-faceted Rasch measurement analysis (Linacre, 1994 ). This approach applies measurement models to thoroughly analyze various factors that can influence test outcomes, including test takers’ proficiency, item difficulty, and rater severity, among others. The underlying principles and functionality of multi-faceted Rasch measurement are illustrated in (12).

\(\log \left(\frac{{P}_{{nijk}}}{{P}_{{nij}(k-1)}}\right)={B}_{n}-{D}_{i}-{C}_{j}-{F}_{k}\)

(12) defines the logarithmic transformation of the probability ratio ( P nijk /P nij(k-1) )) as a function of multiple parameters. Here, n represents the test taker, i denotes a writing proficiency measure, j corresponds to the human rater, and k represents the proficiency score. The parameter B n signifies the proficiency level of test taker n (where n ranges from 1 to N). D j represents the difficulty parameter of test item i (where i ranges from 1 to L), while C j represents the severity of rater j (where j ranges from 1 to J). Additionally, F k represents the step difficulty for a test taker to move from score ‘k-1’ to k . P nijk refers to the probability of rater j assigning score k to test taker n for test item i . P nij(k-1) represents the likelihood of test taker n being assigned score ‘k-1’ by rater j for test item i . Each facet within the test is treated as an independent parameter and estimated within the same reference framework. To evaluate the consistency of scores obtained through both human and computer analysis, we utilized the Infit mean-square statistic. This statistic is a chi-square measure divided by the degrees of freedom and is weighted with information. It demonstrates higher sensitivity to unexpected patterns in responses to items near a person’s proficiency level (Linacre, 2002 ). Fit statistics are assessed based on predefined thresholds for acceptable fit. For the Infit MNSQ, which has a mean of 1.00, different thresholds have been suggested. Some propose stricter thresholds ranging from 0.7 to 1.3 (Bond et al. 2021 ), while others suggest more lenient thresholds ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 (Eckes, 2009 ). In this study, we adopted the criterion of 0.70–1.30 for the Infit MNSQ.

Moving forward, we can now proceed to assess the effectiveness of the 16 proposed measures based on five criteria for accurately distinguishing various levels of writing proficiency among non-native Japanese speakers. To conduct this evaluation, we utilized the development dataset from the I-JAS corpus, as described in Section Dataset . Table 4 provides a measurement report that presents the performance details of the 14 metrics under consideration. The measure separation was found to be 4.02, indicating a clear differentiation among the measures. The reliability index for the measure separation was 0.891, suggesting consistency in the measurement. Similarly, the person separation reliability index was 0.802, indicating the accuracy of the assessment in distinguishing between individuals. All 16 measures demonstrated Infit mean squares within a reasonable range, ranging from 0.76 to 1.28. The Synonym overlap/paragraph (topic) measure exhibited a relatively high outfit mean square of 1.46, although the Infit mean square falls within an acceptable range. The standard error for the measures ranged from 0.13 to 0.28, indicating the precision of the estimates.

Table 5 further illustrated the weights assigned to different linguistic measures for score prediction, with higher weights indicating stronger correlations between those measures and higher scores. Specifically, the following measures exhibited higher weights compared to others: moving average type token ratio per essay has a weight of 0.0391. Mean dependency distance had a weight of 0.0388. Mean length of clause, calculated by dividing the number of words by the number of clauses, had a weight of 0.0374. Complex nominals per T-unit, calculated by dividing the number of complex nominals by the number of T-units, had a weight of 0.0379. Coordinate phrases rate, calculated by dividing the number of coordinate phrases by the number of clauses, had a weight of 0.0325. Grammatical error rate, representing the number of errors per essay, had a weight of 0.0322.

Criteria (output indicator)

The criteria used to evaluate the writing ability in this study were based on CEFR, which follows a six-point scale ranging from A1 to C2. To assess the quality of Japanese writing, the scoring criteria from Table 6 were utilized. These criteria were derived from the IELTS writing standards and served as assessment guidelines and prompts for the written output.

A prompt is a question or detailed instruction that is provided to the model to obtain a proper response. After several pilot experiments, we decided to provide the measures (Section Measures of writing proficiency for nonnative Japanese ) as the input prompt and use the criteria (Section Criteria (output indicator) ) as the output indicator. Regarding the prompt language, considering that the LLM was tasked with rating Japanese essays, would prompt in Japanese works better Footnote 5 ? We conducted experiments comparing the performance of GPT-4 using both English and Japanese prompts. Additionally, we utilized the Japanese local model OCLL with Japanese prompts. Multiple trials were conducted using the same sample. Regardless of the prompt language used, we consistently obtained the same grading results with GPT-4, which assigned a grade of B1 to the writing sample. This suggested that GPT-4 is reliable and capable of producing consistent ratings regardless of the prompt language. On the other hand, when we used Japanese prompts with the Japanese local model “OCLL”, we encountered inconsistent grading results. Out of 10 attempts with OCLL, only 6 yielded consistent grading results (B1), while the remaining 4 showed different outcomes, including A1 and B2 grades. These findings indicated that the language of the prompt was not the determining factor for reliable AES. Instead, the size of the training data and the model parameters played crucial roles in achieving consistent and reliable AES results for the language model.

The following is the utilized prompt, which details all measures and requires the LLM to score the essays using holistic and trait scores.

Please evaluate Japanese essays written by Japanese learners and assign a score to each essay on a six-point scale, ranging from A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 to C2. Additionally, please provide trait scores and display the calculation process for each trait score. The scoring should be based on the following criteria:

Moving average type-token ratio.

Number of lexical words (token) divided by the total number of words per essay.

Number of sophisticated word types divided by the total number of words per essay.

Mean length of clause.

Verb phrases per T-unit.

Clauses per T-unit.

Dependent clauses per T-unit.

Complex nominals per clause.

Adverbial clauses per clause.

Coordinate phrases per clause.

Mean dependency distance.

Synonym overlap paragraph (topic and keywords).

Word2vec cosine similarity.

Connectives per essay.

Conjunctions per essay.

Number of metadiscourse markers (types) divided by the total number of words.

Number of errors per essay.

Japanese essay text

出かける前に二人が地図を見ている間に、サンドイッチを入れたバスケットに犬が入ってしまいました。それに気づかずに二人は楽しそうに出かけて行きました。やがて突然犬がバスケットから飛び出し、二人は驚きました。バスケット の 中を見ると、食べ物はすべて犬に食べられていて、二人は困ってしまいました。(ID_JJJ01_SW1)

The score of the example above was B1. Figure 3 provides an example of holistic and trait scores provided by GPT-4 (with a prompt indicating all measures) via Bing Footnote 6 .

Example of GPT-4 AES and feedback (with a prompt indicating all measures).

Statistical analysis

The aim of this study is to investigate the potential use of LLM for nonnative Japanese AES. It seeks to compare the scoring outcomes obtained from feature-based AES tools, which rely on conventional machine learning technology (i.e. Jess, JWriter), with those generated by AI-driven AES tools utilizing deep learning technology (BERT, GPT, OCLL). To assess the reliability of a computer-assisted annotation tool, the study initially established human-human agreement as the benchmark measure. Subsequently, the performance of the LLM-based method was evaluated by comparing it to human-human agreement.

To assess annotation agreement, the study employed standard measures such as precision, recall, and F-score (Brants 2000 ; Lu 2010 ), along with the quadratically weighted kappa (QWK) to evaluate the consistency and agreement in the annotation process. Assume A and B represent human annotators. When comparing the annotations of the two annotators, the following results are obtained. The evaluation of precision, recall, and F-score metrics was illustrated in equations (13) to (15).

\({\rm{Recall}}(A,B)=\frac{{\rm{Number}}\,{\rm{of}}\,{\rm{identical}}\,{\rm{nodes}}\,{\rm{in}}\,A\,{\rm{and}}\,B}{{\rm{Number}}\,{\rm{of}}\,{\rm{nodes}}\,{\rm{in}}\,A}\)

\({\rm{Precision}}(A,\,B)=\frac{{\rm{Number}}\,{\rm{of}}\,{\rm{identical}}\,{\rm{nodes}}\,{\rm{in}}\,A\,{\rm{and}}\,B}{{\rm{Number}}\,{\rm{of}}\,{\rm{nodes}}\,{\rm{in}}\,B}\)

The F-score is the harmonic mean of recall and precision:

\({\rm{F}}-{\rm{score}}=\frac{2* ({\rm{Precision}}* {\rm{Recall}})}{{\rm{Precision}}+{\rm{Recall}}}\)

The highest possible value of an F-score is 1.0, indicating perfect precision and recall, and the lowest possible value is 0, if either precision or recall are zero.

In accordance with Taghipour and Ng ( 2016 ), the calculation of QWK involves two steps:

Step 1: Construct a weight matrix W as follows:

\({W}_{{ij}}=\frac{{(i-j)}^{2}}{{(N-1)}^{2}}\)

i represents the annotation made by the tool, while j represents the annotation made by a human rater. N denotes the total number of possible annotations. Matrix O is subsequently computed, where O_( i, j ) represents the count of data annotated by the tool ( i ) and the human annotator ( j ). On the other hand, E refers to the expected count matrix, which undergoes normalization to ensure that the sum of elements in E matches the sum of elements in O.

Step 2: With matrices O and E, the QWK is obtained as follows:

K = 1- \(\frac{\sum i,j{W}_{i,j}\,{O}_{i,j}}{\sum i,j{W}_{i,j}\,{E}_{i,j}}\)

The value of the quadratic weighted kappa increases as the level of agreement improves. Further, to assess the accuracy of LLM scoring, the proportional reductive mean square error (PRMSE) was employed. The PRMSE approach takes into account the variability observed in human ratings to estimate the rater error, which is then subtracted from the variance of the human labels. This calculation provides an overall measure of agreement between the automated scores and true scores (Haberman et al. 2015 ; Loukina et al. 2020 ; Taghipour and Ng, 2016 ). The computation of PRMSE involves the following steps:

Step 1: Calculate the mean squared errors (MSEs) for the scoring outcomes of the computer-assisted tool (MSE tool) and the human scoring outcomes (MSE human).

Step 2: Determine the PRMSE by comparing the MSE of the computer-assisted tool (MSE tool) with the MSE from human raters (MSE human), using the following formula:

\({\rm{PRMSE}}=1-\frac{({\rm{MSE}}\,{\rm{tool}})\,}{({\rm{MSE}}\,{\rm{human}})\,}=1-\,\frac{{\sum }_{i}^{n}=1{({{\rm{y}}}_{i}-{\hat{{\rm{y}}}}_{{\rm{i}}})}^{2}}{{\sum }_{i}^{n}=1{({{\rm{y}}}_{i}-\hat{{\rm{y}}})}^{2}}\)

In the numerator, ŷi represents the scoring outcome predicted by a specific LLM-driven AES system for a given sample. The term y i − ŷ i represents the difference between this predicted outcome and the mean value of all LLM-driven AES systems’ scoring outcomes. It quantifies the deviation of the specific LLM-driven AES system’s prediction from the average prediction of all LLM-driven AES systems. In the denominator, y i − ŷ represents the difference between the scoring outcome provided by a specific human rater for a given sample and the mean value of all human raters’ scoring outcomes. It measures the discrepancy between the specific human rater’s score and the average score given by all human raters. The PRMSE is then calculated by subtracting the ratio of the MSE tool to the MSE human from 1. PRMSE falls within the range of 0 to 1, with larger values indicating reduced errors in LLM’s scoring compared to those of human raters. In other words, a higher PRMSE implies that LLM’s scoring demonstrates greater accuracy in predicting the true scores (Loukina et al. 2020 ). The interpretation of kappa values, ranging from 0 to 1, is based on the work of Landis and Koch ( 1977 ). Specifically, the following categories are assigned to different ranges of kappa values: −1 indicates complete inconsistency, 0 indicates random agreement, 0.0 ~ 0.20 indicates extremely low level of agreement (slight), 0.21 ~ 0.40 indicates moderate level of agreement (fair), 0.41 ~ 0.60 indicates medium level of agreement (moderate), 0.61 ~ 0.80 indicates high level of agreement (substantial), 0.81 ~ 1 indicates almost perfect level of agreement. All statistical analyses were executed using Python script.

Results and discussion

Annotation reliability of the llm.

This section focuses on assessing the reliability of the LLM’s annotation and scoring capabilities. To evaluate the reliability, several tests were conducted simultaneously, aiming to achieve the following objectives:

Assess the LLM’s ability to differentiate between test takers with varying levels of oral proficiency.

Determine the level of agreement between the annotations and scoring performed by the LLM and those done by human raters.

The evaluation of the results encompassed several metrics, including: precision, recall, F-Score, quadratically-weighted kappa, proportional reduction of mean squared error, Pearson correlation, and multi-faceted Rasch measurement.

Inter-annotator agreement (human–human annotator agreement)

We started with an agreement test of the two human annotators. Two trained annotators were recruited to determine the writing task data measures. A total of 714 scripts, as the test data, was utilized. Each analysis lasted 300–360 min. Inter-annotator agreement was evaluated using the standard measures of precision, recall, and F-score and QWK. Table 7 presents the inter-annotator agreement for the various indicators. As shown, the inter-annotator agreement was fairly high, with F-scores ranging from 1.0 for sentence and word number to 0.666 for grammatical errors.

The findings from the QWK analysis provided further confirmation of the inter-annotator agreement. The QWK values covered a range from 0.950 ( p  = 0.000) for sentence and word number to 0.695 for synonym overlap number (keyword) and grammatical errors ( p  = 0.001).

Agreement of annotation outcomes between human and LLM

To evaluate the consistency between human annotators and LLM annotators (BERT, GPT, OCLL) across the indices, the same test was conducted. The results of the inter-annotator agreement (F-score) between LLM and human annotation are provided in Appendix B-D. The F-scores ranged from 0.706 for Grammatical error # for OCLL-human to a perfect 1.000 for GPT-human, for sentences, clauses, T-units, and words. These findings were further supported by the QWK analysis, which showed agreement levels ranging from 0.807 ( p  = 0.001) for metadiscourse markers for OCLL-human to 0.962 for words ( p  = 0.000) for GPT-human. The findings demonstrated that the LLM annotation achieved a significant level of accuracy in identifying measurement units and counts.

Reliability of LLM-driven AES’s scoring and discriminating proficiency levels

This section examines the reliability of the LLM-driven AES scoring through a comparison of the scoring outcomes produced by human raters and the LLM ( Reliability of LLM-driven AES scoring ). It also assesses the effectiveness of the LLM-based AES system in differentiating participants with varying proficiency levels ( Reliability of LLM-driven AES discriminating proficiency levels ).

Reliability of LLM-driven AES scoring

Table 8 summarizes the QWK coefficient analysis between the scores computed by the human raters and the GPT-4 for the individual essays from I-JAS Footnote 7 . As shown, the QWK of all measures ranged from k  = 0.819 for lexical density (number of lexical words (tokens)/number of words per essay) to k  = 0.644 for word2vec cosine similarity. Table 9 further presents the Pearson correlations between the 16 writing proficiency measures scored by human raters and GPT 4 for the individual essays. The correlations ranged from 0.672 for syntactic complexity to 0.734 for grammatical accuracy. The correlations between the writing proficiency scores assigned by human raters and the BERT-based AES system were found to range from 0.661 for syntactic complexity to 0.713 for grammatical accuracy. The correlations between the writing proficiency scores given by human raters and the OCLL-based AES system ranged from 0.654 for cohesion to 0.721 for grammatical accuracy. These findings indicated an alignment between the assessments made by human raters and both the BERT-based and OCLL-based AES systems in terms of various aspects of writing proficiency.

Reliability of LLM-driven AES discriminating proficiency levels

After validating the reliability of the LLM’s annotation and scoring, the subsequent objective was to evaluate its ability to distinguish between various proficiency levels. For this analysis, a dataset of 686 individual essays was utilized. Table 10 presents a sample of the results, summarizing the means, standard deviations, and the outcomes of the one-way ANOVAs based on the measures assessed by the GPT-4 model. A post hoc multiple comparison test, specifically the Bonferroni test, was conducted to identify any potential differences between pairs of levels.

As the results reveal, seven measures presented linear upward or downward progress across the three proficiency levels. These were marked in bold in Table 10 and comprise one measure of lexical richness, i.e. MATTR (lexical diversity); four measures of syntactic complexity, i.e. MDD (mean dependency distance), MLC (mean length of clause), CNT (complex nominals per T-unit), CPC (coordinate phrases rate); one cohesion measure, i.e. word2vec cosine similarity and GER (grammatical error rate). Regarding the ability of the sixteen measures to distinguish adjacent proficiency levels, the Bonferroni tests indicated that statistically significant differences exist between the primary level and the intermediate level for MLC and GER. One measure of lexical richness, namely LD, along with three measures of syntactic complexity (VPT, CT, DCT, ACC), two measures of cohesion (SOPT, SOPK), and one measure of content elaboration (IMM), exhibited statistically significant differences between proficiency levels. However, these differences did not demonstrate a linear progression between adjacent proficiency levels. No significant difference was observed in lexical sophistication between proficiency levels.

To summarize, our study aimed to evaluate the reliability and differentiation capabilities of the LLM-driven AES method. For the first objective, we assessed the LLM’s ability to differentiate between test takers with varying levels of oral proficiency using precision, recall, F-Score, and quadratically-weighted kappa. Regarding the second objective, we compared the scoring outcomes generated by human raters and the LLM to determine the level of agreement. We employed quadratically-weighted kappa and Pearson correlations to compare the 16 writing proficiency measures for the individual essays. The results confirmed the feasibility of using the LLM for annotation and scoring in AES for nonnative Japanese. As a result, Research Question 1 has been addressed.

Comparison of BERT-, GPT-, OCLL-based AES, and linguistic-feature-based computation methods

This section aims to compare the effectiveness of five AES methods for nonnative Japanese writing, i.e. LLM-driven approaches utilizing BERT, GPT, and OCLL, linguistic feature-based approaches using Jess and JWriter. The comparison was conducted by comparing the ratings obtained from each approach with human ratings. All ratings were derived from the dataset introduced in Dataset . To facilitate the comparison, the agreement between the automated methods and human ratings was assessed using QWK and PRMSE. The performance of each approach was summarized in Table 11 .

The QWK coefficient values indicate that LLMs (GPT, BERT, OCLL) and human rating outcomes demonstrated higher agreement compared to feature-based AES methods (Jess and JWriter) in assessing writing proficiency criteria, including lexical richness, syntactic complexity, content, and grammatical accuracy. Among the LLMs, the GPT-4 driven AES and human rating outcomes showed the highest agreement in all criteria, except for syntactic complexity. The PRMSE values suggest that the GPT-based method outperformed linguistic feature-based methods and other LLM-based approaches. Moreover, an interesting finding emerged during the study: the agreement coefficient between GPT-4 and human scoring was even higher than the agreement between different human raters themselves. This discovery highlights the advantage of GPT-based AES over human rating. Ratings involve a series of processes, including reading the learners’ writing, evaluating the content and language, and assigning scores. Within this chain of processes, various biases can be introduced, stemming from factors such as rater biases, test design, and rating scales. These biases can impact the consistency and objectivity of human ratings. GPT-based AES may benefit from its ability to apply consistent and objective evaluation criteria. By prompting the GPT model with detailed writing scoring rubrics and linguistic features, potential biases in human ratings can be mitigated. The model follows a predefined set of guidelines and does not possess the same subjective biases that human raters may exhibit. This standardization in the evaluation process contributes to the higher agreement observed between GPT-4 and human scoring. Section Prompt strategy of the study delves further into the role of prompts in the application of LLMs to AES. It explores how the choice and implementation of prompts can impact the performance and reliability of LLM-based AES methods. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge the strengths of the local model, i.e. the Japanese local model OCLL, which excels in processing certain idiomatic expressions. Nevertheless, our analysis indicated that GPT-4 surpasses local models in AES. This superior performance can be attributed to the larger parameter size of GPT-4, estimated to be between 500 billion and 1 trillion, which exceeds the sizes of both BERT and the local model OCLL.

Prompt strategy

In the context of prompt strategy, Mizumoto and Eguchi ( 2023 ) conducted a study where they applied the GPT-3 model to automatically score English essays in the TOEFL test. They found that the accuracy of the GPT model alone was moderate to fair. However, when they incorporated linguistic measures such as cohesion, syntactic complexity, and lexical features alongside the GPT model, the accuracy significantly improved. This highlights the importance of prompt engineering and providing the model with specific instructions to enhance its performance. In this study, a similar approach was taken to optimize the performance of LLMs. GPT-4, which outperformed BERT and OCLL, was selected as the candidate model. Model 1 was used as the baseline, representing GPT-4 without any additional prompting. Model 2, on the other hand, involved GPT-4 prompted with 16 measures that included scoring criteria, efficient linguistic features for writing assessment, and detailed measurement units and calculation formulas. The remaining models (Models 3 to 18) utilized GPT-4 prompted with individual measures. The performance of these 18 different models was assessed using the output indicators described in Section Criteria (output indicator) . By comparing the performances of these models, the study aimed to understand the impact of prompt engineering on the accuracy and effectiveness of GPT-4 in AES tasks.

Based on the PRMSE scores presented in Fig. 4 , it was observed that Model 1, representing GPT-4 without any additional prompting, achieved a fair level of performance. However, Model 2, which utilized GPT-4 prompted with all measures, outperformed all other models in terms of PRMSE score, achieving a score of 0.681. These results indicate that the inclusion of specific measures and prompts significantly enhanced the performance of GPT-4 in AES. Among the measures, syntactic complexity was found to play a particularly significant role in improving the accuracy of GPT-4 in assessing writing quality. Following that, lexical diversity emerged as another important factor contributing to the model’s effectiveness. The study suggests that a well-prompted GPT-4 can serve as a valuable tool to support human assessors in evaluating writing quality. By utilizing GPT-4 as an automated scoring tool, the evaluation biases associated with human raters can be minimized. This has the potential to empower teachers by allowing them to focus on designing writing tasks and guiding writing strategies, while leveraging the capabilities of GPT-4 for efficient and reliable scoring.

PRMSE scores of the 18 AES models.

This study aimed to investigate two main research questions: the feasibility of utilizing LLMs for AES and the impact of prompt engineering on the application of LLMs in AES.

To address the first objective, the study compared the effectiveness of five different models: GPT, BERT, the Japanese local LLM (OCLL), and two conventional machine learning-based AES tools (Jess and JWriter). The PRMSE values indicated that the GPT-4-based method outperformed other LLMs (BERT, OCLL) and linguistic feature-based computational methods (Jess and JWriter) across various writing proficiency criteria. Furthermore, the agreement coefficient between GPT-4 and human scoring surpassed the agreement among human raters themselves, highlighting the potential of using the GPT-4 tool to enhance AES by reducing biases and subjectivity, saving time, labor, and cost, and providing valuable feedback for self-study. Regarding the second goal, the role of prompt design was investigated by comparing 18 models, including a baseline model, a model prompted with all measures, and 16 models prompted with one measure at a time. GPT-4, which outperformed BERT and OCLL, was selected as the candidate model. The PRMSE scores of the models showed that GPT-4 prompted with all measures achieved the best performance, surpassing the baseline and other models.

In conclusion, this study has demonstrated the potential of LLMs in supporting human rating in assessments. By incorporating automation, we can save time and resources while reducing biases and subjectivity inherent in human rating processes. Automated language assessments offer the advantage of accessibility, providing equal opportunities and economic feasibility for individuals who lack access to traditional assessment centers or necessary resources. LLM-based language assessments provide valuable feedback and support to learners, aiding in the enhancement of their language proficiency and the achievement of their goals. This personalized feedback can cater to individual learner needs, facilitating a more tailored and effective language-learning experience.

There are three important areas that merit further exploration. First, prompt engineering requires attention to ensure optimal performance of LLM-based AES across different language types. This study revealed that GPT-4, when prompted with all measures, outperformed models prompted with fewer measures. Therefore, investigating and refining prompt strategies can enhance the effectiveness of LLMs in automated language assessments. Second, it is crucial to explore the application of LLMs in second-language assessment and learning for oral proficiency, as well as their potential in under-resourced languages. Recent advancements in self-supervised machine learning techniques have significantly improved automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, opening up new possibilities for creating reliable ASR systems, particularly for under-resourced languages with limited data. However, challenges persist in the field of ASR. First, ASR assumes correct word pronunciation for automatic pronunciation evaluation, which proves challenging for learners in the early stages of language acquisition due to diverse accents influenced by their native languages. Accurately segmenting short words becomes problematic in such cases. Second, developing precise audio-text transcriptions for languages with non-native accented speech poses a formidable task. Last, assessing oral proficiency levels involves capturing various linguistic features, including fluency, pronunciation, accuracy, and complexity, which are not easily captured by current NLP technology.

Data availability

The dataset utilized was obtained from the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS). The data URLs: [ https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/jll/lsaj/ihome2.html ].

J-CAT and TTBJ are two computerized adaptive tests used to assess Japanese language proficiency.

SPOT is a specific component of the TTBJ test.

J-CAT: https://www.j-cat2.org/html/ja/pages/interpret.html

SPOT: https://ttbj.cegloc.tsukuba.ac.jp/p1.html#SPOT .

The study utilized a prompt-based GPT-4 model, developed by OpenAI, which has an impressive architecture with 1.8 trillion parameters across 120 layers. GPT-4 was trained on a vast dataset of 13 trillion tokens, using two stages: initial training on internet text datasets to predict the next token, and subsequent fine-tuning through reinforcement learning from human feedback.

https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/jll/lsaj/ihome2-en.html .

http://jhlee.sakura.ne.jp/JEV/ by Japanese Learning Dictionary Support Group 2015.

We express our sincere gratitude to the reviewer for bringing this matter to our attention.

On February 7, 2023, Microsoft began rolling out a major overhaul to Bing that included a new chatbot feature based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 (Bing.com).

Appendix E-F present the analysis results of the QWK coefficient between the scores computed by the human raters and the BERT, OCLL models.

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This research was funded by National Foundation of Social Sciences (22BYY186) to Wenchao Li.

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Li, W., Liu, H. Applying large language models for automated essay scoring for non-native Japanese. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 723 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03209-9

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A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing

By James Kirchick

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing writer to Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail and the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

This month, an account on X with the handle @moyurireads and 360 followers published a link to a color-coded spreadsheet classifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. Titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?,” it reads like a cross between Tiger Beat and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The novelist Emily St. John Mandel, the author of “Station Eleven” and “Sea of Tranquility,” earned a red “pro-Israel/Zionist” classification because, according to the list’s creator, she “travels to Israel frequently talks favorably about it.” Simply for posting a link to the Israeli chapter of the Red Cross, the novelist Kristin Hannah was deemed a “Zionist,” as was the author Gabrielle Zevin for delivering a book talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization. Needless to say, the creator of the list — whose post on X announcing it garnered over a million views within a few days — encourages readers to boycott any works produced by “Zionists.”

The spreadsheet is but the crudest example of the virulently anti-Israel — and increasingly antisemitic — sentiment that has been coursing through the literary world since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. Much of it revolves around the charge of genocide and seeks to punish Zionists and anyone else who refuses to explicitly denounce the Jewish state for allegedly committing said crime. Since a large majority of American Jews (80 percent of whom, according to a 2020 poll , said that caring about Israel is an important or essential part of their Judaism) are Zionists, to accuse all Zionists of complicity in genocide is to anathematize a core component of Jewish identity.

Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.

As is always and everywhere the case, this growing antisemitism is concomitant with a rising illiberalism. Rarely, if ever, do writers express unanimity on a contentious political issue. We’re a naturally argumentative bunch who — at least in theory — answer only to our own consciences.

To compel them to express support or disapproval for a cause is one of the cruelest things a society can do to writers, whose role is to tell society what they believe, regardless of how popular the message may be. The drawing up of lists, in particular, is a tactic with a long and ignominious history, employed by the enemies of literature — and liberty — on both the left and the right. But the problem goes much deeper than a tyro blacklist targeting “Zionists.”

One of the greatest mass delusions of the 21st century is the belief that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. This grotesque moral inversion — in which a genocidal terrorist organization that instigated a war with Israel by committing the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is absolved of responsibility while the victim of Hamas’s attack is charged with perpetrating the worst crime known to man — began taking shape before Israel even launched its ground invasion of Gaza.

A charitable description of those imputing genocidal motivations to Israel is that they are ignorant, essentially believing the word to mean “large numbers of civilian casualties.” (Here it’s worth noting that the United Nations, to little notice, has significantly lowered its estimate of the number of women and children killed in Gaza.) For others, accusing Israel of genocide is an emotional outlet for expressing outrage at such a horrific loss of life. A third, more pessimistic, characterization of the ubiquitous genocide canard is that it is only the latest iteration of the ancient antisemitic blood libel, which held that Jews murdered gentile children in order to use their blood for religious rituals.

College students and professional activists using overheated and imprecise language to convey their strongly held beliefs is hardly uncommon, and much of the intemperate language being directed at Israel and its Zionist supporters can be attributed to the hyperbole that increasingly characterizes our political discourse. What should worry us more is when people who have dedicated their lives to the written word manipulate language for a political end, one that is stigmatizing Jews.

Nine days after the Oct. 7 attack, the popular website Literary Hub began publishing what has since become a near-daily torrent of agitprop invective against what it describes as the “rogue ethnostate” of Israel, which it routinely accuses of committing genocide. In March, after a mass resignation of its staff members , the literary magazine Guernica retracted a personal essay by a left-wing Israeli woman about her experience volunteering to drive Palestinian children to Israel for medical treatment. In her resignation letter, one of the magazine’s co-publishers denounced the piece as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

Whereas antisemitism in the literary world used to lurk in the shadows, according to the Jewish Book Council’s chief executive, Naomi Firestone-Teeter, since Oct. 7, it has become increasingly overt. “The fact that people have felt so proud and open about it is a different beast entirely,” she said. One of the most disturbing developments in this regard has been the frequency and contempt with which the word “Zionist” is now spit from people’s mouths in the United States.

Until relatively recently, the use of “Zionist” as a slur was most commonly confined to Soviet and Arab propagandists, who spent decades trying to render the word the moral equivalent of “Nazi.” Today many progressives use the word in similar fashion, making no distinction between a Zionist who supports a two-state solution (which, presumably, most Jews in the overwhelmingly liberal literary world do) and one who believes in a “Greater Israel” encompassing the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And while anyone can be a Zionist, I’ve found in my 20 years of reporting on antisemitism that many Jews essentially hear “Jew” when someone shouts “Zionist" at them.

The corruption of the words “genocide” and “Zionist” lies at the root of the controversy threatening to unravel PEN America, the storied writers’ organization. As with many a literary contretemps, it involves a cascade of open letters. In February a missive that gained almost 1,500 signatures was published demanding that PEN “wake up from its own silent, tepid, neither-here-nor-there, self-congratulatory middle of the road and take an actual stand against an actual genocide.” The dozens of statements PEN had issued by that time calling attention to the plight of writers in Gaza (who the letter, without citing evidence, claimed had been “targeted” by Israel for assassination) were insufficient. “We demand PEN America release an official statement” about the writers killed in Gaza the letter read, “and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.”

On March 20, PEN acceded to the ultimatum that it endorse the call for a cease-fire. But that did not satiate its critics.

Last month, in advance of PEN’s annual literary awards ceremony, nearly half of the nominated writers withdrew from the competition. A subset of those writers then released another open letter , declaring, “Among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.” They accused PEN of “normalizing genocide,” denounced PEN for its “platforming of Zionists” and, most shamefully, called for the resignation of its Jewish chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, on account of her “longstanding commitments to Zionism.”

Along with eight other past presidents of PEN, Salman Rushdie signed a letter in defense of the organization , an intervention that earned him an “unclear” rating on the anti-Zionist blacklist. (He has braved far worse from Islamist zealots and their Western apologists.) PEN ultimately canceled both the awards ceremony and subsequent World Voices Festival.

Dissatisfaction with PEN’s purported lack of indignation over the deaths of Palestinian writers is a fig leaf. Where were the efforts by those now decrying PEN to protest the complete absence of freedom of expression that has characterized the Gaza Strip under 17 years of Hamas rule?

The real objectives behind the cynical weaponization of the word “genocide” and the authoritarian insistence that anyone who disagrees with it is an enabler of one are to shut down debate, defame dissenters and impose a rigid orthodoxy throughout the publishing world. It is a naked attempt to impose an ideological litmus test on anyone hoping to join the republic of letters — a litmus test that the vast majority of Jews would fail.

A campaign of intimidation, the sort of thing that happens to the dissident writers in closed societies whom PEN regularly champions, is afoot to pressure writers into toeing this new party line. PEN’s current president, Jenny Finney Boylan, recently said that she had heard from “many, many authors who do not agree with those withdrawing from PEN events and who do not wish to withdraw from our events themselves but are afraid of the consequences if they speak up.”

Compelling speech — which is ultimately what PEN’s critics are demanding of it — is the tactic of commissars, not writers in a free society. Censorship, thought policing and bullying are antithetical to the spirit of literature, which is best understood as an intimate conversation between the author and individual readers.

PEN’s detractors aren’t helping the Palestinian people with their whitewashing of Hamas. They’re engaged in a hostile takeover of a noble organization committed to the defense of free expression in order to advance a sectarian and bigoted political agenda.

Neil Gaiman, Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Ms. Mandel and other hugely successful authors need not worry that being denounced as a Zionist will hurt their careers. But the blacklists and the boycotts do not really target them. The actual targets of this crusade are lesser-known authors, budding novelists, aspiring poets and creative writing students — largely but not exclusively Jewish — who can feel a change in the air.

“I do now definitely have concern as a Jewish author — two years working on a novel that has absolutely nothing to do with Jews in any way, just because it says ‘National Jewish Book Award winner’ in my bio — that it may change the way readers see the work,” said a Jewish creative writing professor and novelist who spoke to me on the condition of being quoted anonymously.

No longer is being on the receiving end of a review bomb the worst fate that can befall a Jewish writer exploring Jewish themes; even getting such a book published is becoming increasingly difficult. “It’s very clear you have to have real courage to acquire and publish proudly Jewish voices and books about being Jewish,” a prominent literary agent told me. “When you are seen as genocidal, a moral insult to humanity because you believe in Israel’s right to exist, you are now seen as deserving of being canceled.”

There’s a distasteful irony in a literary community that has gone to the barricades fighting book “bans” now rallying to boycott authors based on their ethnoreligious identity. For a growing set of writers, declaring one’s belief that the world’s only Jewish state is a genocidal entity whose dismantlement is necessary for the advancement of humankind is a political fashion statement, a bauble one parades around in order to signify being on the right team. As was Stalinism for an earlier generation of left-wing literary intellectuals, so is antisemitism becoming the avant-garde.

James Kirchick is a contributing writer to Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail and the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

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Trump’s hush money guilty verdict is only going to make him more dangerous

What has happened in the course of the Trump hush money trial is absolutely mind-bending, norms-crushing stuff. On Thursday, a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. But while there was no way to anticipate this particular verdict, there is plenty about the aftermath of this trial that we all knew, long before a trial even started. And that has everything to do with Trump's habit of twisting the truth and facts for his own political gain.

Even with the unprecedented nature of this trial, Trump's potential next move is a relatively easy guess.

This is true even though this trial was marked by a number of “firsts,” including its being the first time a U.S. president has ever been tried on criminal charges and the first time a major-party candidate has sat for a criminal trial. The closest America has ever come to this before was with Richard Nixon — although Nixon resigned because other Republicans told him he’d lost the confidence of his fellow party members. In contrast, we've seen very few Republicans stand up to Trump during his two impeachments, during his Jan. 6 insurrection or during his third run at the White House.

Yet even with the unprecedented nature of this trial, Trump's potential next move is a relatively easy guess.

On the night before the closing arguments, Trump “truthed” : “Can you imagine, a President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in the history of our Country, and who is also the Republican Nominee for President in the upcoming 2024 Election, and leading in all polls against the Democrat Nominee, Joe Biden, is tomorrow going before a Corrupt and Conflicted Democrat Appointed, Acting New York Judge, on a FAKE & MADE UP CASE by a Soros backed failed D.A., and the Judge himself, to see whether or not he will become a common criminal?” 

Moments after the jury began deliberating, Trump took to his social media platform again, firing off a series of misleading and outright false claims, including the assertion: “I don’t even know what the charges are in this rigged case — I am entitled to specificity just like anyone else. There is no crime!” Notably, Trump typed this even as, as MSNBC’s Hayes Brown pointed out , the jury sat for more than an hour while Judge Juan Merchan provided detailed instructions about what jury deliberations entail. That post was just one of many in which Trump refuted the validity of any pending guilty verdict.

Trump, a self-proclaimed wannabe autocrat , has made his own criminal case an attack on the rule of law from the start. It is incredibly dangerous to have someone who is supported by a significant percentage of the American people focus on degrading an important American norm. When Trump calls the justice system “corrupt” and “conflicted,” he undermines one of the central tenets of our rule of law: the right to a fair trial. This explains why Trump effectively attempted to undermine a verdict before it was even passed down. He has sought to damage the institution of our justice system from the start. And he has succeeded in chipping away at its perceived legitimacy, long before any verdict was handed down.   

A lot of Trump watchers believe that Trump’s main goal in running for president was to afford himself some legal protection. According to Republican Will Hurd , Trump is running for president "because he’s trying to stay out of jail." Trump announced he was running for president ridiculously early, a week after his party underperformed in the midterms. Since then, he has been laser-focused on trying to merge his status as a defendant with his status as a candidate — creating a scenario in which Trump is pitting himself against the Justice Department and the rule of law. 

Perhaps even more significantly, running for president presented an opportunity to have GOP donors pay his legal bills. Which they did, to the tune of $100 million .

Since mid-April, Trump has been sitting in a criminal court listening to everyone from adult film star Stormy Daniels to National Enquirer owner David Pecker testify about their damning experiences with Trump. At times, it seemed as if candidate Trump and his team didn’t help defendant Trump much during the trial. At one point, Trump lawyer Susan Necheles attacked Daniels, saying, “You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex.” This comment opened the door for Daniels to testify about the sexual relationship she says she had with the Republican front-runner, an unforced error that could have been avoided. A former federal prosecutor, Jim Walden, told The Washington Post , “Whatever else Donald Trump may be — a great businessman, a great reality TV show host, a great politician — he’s a dumb lawyer.” 

So what happens now? Now that we have a verdict in the case, there’s a good chance Trump will play it as being what he expected, and even wanted. We should expect him to go scorched-earth, because he so often does. We know he will try to weaponize this verdict and craft it into an assault on the rule of law, on the judge and the jury and on New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

No matter what the outcome, Trump was always going to try to use candidate Trump to help defendant Trump. And any verdict was destined to be molded into his branded narrative of persecution, witch hunts and a fight against the political system. Of that we can be certain.

Molly Jong-Fast is a political analyst for MSNBC, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and host of the podcast "Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast."

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2024 Awards

Mcpartlin awards.

Navigating Modes of Communication: Experiences of Being Bilingual

June 06, 2024

1st place McPartlin Award

Climate Change Communication: A Politicized Landscape within the U.S. Catholic Church’s Hierarchy

2nd place McPartlin Award

Hesburgh Library Desks: The Documented History of Students

3rd place McPartlin Award

Raclin Murphy Museum of Art Awards

The Making of a Modernist Icon

1st place Raclin Murphy Museum of Art Award

An Active Rest: The Intersection of Religion and Politics in Claude Lorrain’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt

2nd place Raclin Murphy Museum of Art Award