When tracing the epistemological but also thematic development of metaphor studies in Egyptology, what can be seen is a change from a typological perspective, which sought to categorize both motifs and metaphor types, to a more cognitive perspective, which was more interested in the processes behind the linguistic phenomena. In the last few years there has also been increased interest in the development of metaphors in pan-textual as well as multimodal perspective and in the usage and extent of metaphors in all range of phenomena, such as textual, graphemic, and even pictorial media.

Metaphors are tropes driven by similarity relations that appear in texts, script, images, and even objects from ancient Egypt. When tracing the disciplinary and thematic development of metaphor studies in Egyptology, what can be seen is a change from a typological perspective, which sought to categorize both motifs and metaphor types, to a cognitive perspective, which was more interested in the processes behind the linguistic phenomena. Recently, there has also been increased interest in the development of metaphors in textual and multimodal perspective, and in the usage of metaphors across various media.