A familiar name...

Take a gander at this piece, on exhibit at the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany:

Pyramidion from the time of Ramses II. Image from the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum website.

It's a pyramidion, dating to the time of Ramses II. For those of you not familiar with ancient Egyptian things, a pyramidion is the capstone of a small brick pyramid that was used in the New Kingdom to mark the location of the tomb of an official or noble. The four sides contained text and scenes related to the Sun as it travelled through the sky by day and the underworld by night. In this image, the right face shows a baboon awaiting the rising of the Sun, and the start of the day. However, it's the left side that is most interesting; the hieroglyphs along the edge are damaged, but one can clearly make out the tomb owner's name and title above his head:

The scribe Moses.

At least, that's one possible pronunciation. The ancient Egyptian language, like Hebrew, has only the consonants written down, so we are left to guess at the pronunciation. It could also be pronounced Meses, or something like that. Possessing a heavy southern accent, I'm not the guy to pronounce anything - my feeble attempts in french either resulted in colleagues rolling on the floor in fits of uncontrollable laughter, or wanting to pull out a knife to cut down the ridiculous American defiling their speech. If you want to hear a very elegant stab at ancient Egyptian, go to Eric's Guide to Ancient Egypt and listen to the "Akhenaten the Monster" podcast. His pronunciation of royal titles leaves me green with envy - I wonder if all professional Egyptologists practice speaking ancient Egyptian in the course of obtaining their degree, or if it is an optional something for the vocally gifted?

Anyway, Moses or Meses is rather common in New Kingdom Egypt, as it appears as part of the names of some of the pharaohs (e.g., Thutmoses, Ramses). The symbols can be translated as "born of" or "child of". So Ramses means "born (child) of Ra" and Thutmoses is "born (child) of Thoth." I'm not used to seeing it by itself in a name, and my rank amateur thought would be that naming someone "Moses" would be like us naming someone "Child" or "Kid". My colleague in Houston, Mark, was the one who sent me the link describing this artifact, and naturally it prompted an email exchange:

On Feb 5, 2016, at 10:56 AM, Mark wrote:

Back on the topic of Moses' name, I note that Josephus also believed the name was Egyptian (note he had access to first-century native Egyptian speakers) but that it was a combination of the word for "water" ("m-w" I think) and the word for "to save", which he transliterated into "uses" in Greek, but which I found was something like "w-dj-w-s" or something similar (I have forgotten the exact spelling, but with a "dj" rather than an "s").  

Of course, this is all complicated by the fact that the Hebrew name is m-sh-h, and typically, the Egyptian "s" was translated by the Semitic letter "samekh" (="s"), not "shin" (="sh").  Also, Josephus (and us as well) are influenced by the Hellenized ending "-es", which is not in the original.

So, ignoring Josephus' second part, could not the first part have been the Egyptian word for water?  In the story, the Princess says she named him (actually, it is ambiguous whether the Princess or Moses' mom names him, but I think the context of the story heavily favors the Princess) because "I drew him out of the water".  Perhaps we have been fixated on the "drawing" (due to the similarity to the verb in Hebrew) rather than the "water".

Just thinking'

On Feb 5, 2016, at 12:25 PM, Bill wrote:

I don’t know… The pyramidion clearly shows that ms-s was a name used in the time of Ramses II. It is used in many pharaonic names - Thutmoses, Rameses, and so forth, and is interpreted as “born of” or “child of”. So here you have an Egyptian princess, who discovers a child of unknown parentage floating on the water, and basically says “His name is ‘kid’”. This makes sense to me, and does not require any stretching of the language. Invoking Josephus seems a bit tenuous, especially since he lived many centuries after Ramses, and he did not know Egyptian - at least not well. You are right in that no Egyptian princess would allow her child to have a Hebrew name, and frankly I do not see any way his mother, who was a slave, would be allowed to name him. Wet nurses did not do the naming, though I suppose a nickname is possible.

There was some more about Josephus, but you get the drift. There are a lot of Egyptophiles in astronomy and engineering, and things like this pyramidion get our little brains thinking about something else other than space. There is zero archaeological evidence for "the" Moses and the Exodus, and I am very skeptical that such an event occurred, but the fact that here we have an example of the name Moses in the time frame assigned by tradition to the Exodus is interesting. It shows that the name was in use.

This Moses did not lead the Israelites out of bondage, but he sure created some chatter among a few rocket scientists today, after 3200 years. Pretty good for an Egyptian scribe.

Getting started with a bit about me...

I must be crazy - I already have a blog where I post stuff on my rocket hobby, and it's hard enough to keep up with that. So why am I starting this one? Well, I do have opinions on things that are not rocket related, and I am not one to spread said opinions all over Facebook and other places; I have no desire to be unfriended. However, one must express oneself on occasion, and that's why I created this place. Here you will find my musings on things mainly archaeological, with a little astronomy here and there; I also cannot promise to stay away from a political post every now and then.

So, now that I have explain the reasoning behind this apparent madness, let's get started with a bit about me.

At work, I'm the lead for the NASA Meteoroid Environments Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, located in Huntsville, Alabama. My specialty is meteoroids (bet you couldn’t guess) with emphasis on the risks posed to spacecraft by this natural debris. But this blog is not going to contain anything related to meteors, or my employer. It's a place for me to let my hair (singular at my age) down and put my thoughts out there for folks to read and comment upon, should they have this desire. However, you cannot separate yourself from your basic nature, and I should warn you that my sister thinks I can be best described as a "short, fat Sheldon Cooper."  After spending many long years getting my PhD in Astronomy, I consider myself a scientist and so think that the scientific method is the best, most objective path to knowledge of the Universe. Over time, I have learned that debates over ideas are healthy and productive, as long as the discussions are based on reasoned thought and objective evidence, and provided that personal attacks are not made on the debaters. This is how progress is made. And this is how I hope to formulate my posts and responses to comments.

Finally, some legalese -  "The opinions in this blog are mine and mine alone."