Isis Names in Graeco-Roman Egypt

chapter 6 Isis Names in Graeco-Roman Egypt

Willy Clarysse

1 Name Giving in General: Meaning and Tradition

When parents give a name to their child, two motives determine their choice: the name may have a meaning which functions as a kind of wish for the child or puts it into a social group, or the name is copied from an existing model. The two criteria may work side by side. A nice example of the interplay between meaningful names and family traditions is offered in Aristophanes’ Clouds:1 Strepsiades and his wife quarrel over the name of their son. Strepsiades is a simple countryman, his wife comes from an aristocratic family in the city. Her uncle was Megakles son of Megakles “great of fame”, with a pun on the name of Perikles of course. She wants to give their son a grandiloquent aristocratic name, like Xanthippos (the father of Perikles) or Kallippides; the ending in -ιππος “horse” points to horsebreeding, a favourite pastime of the nobility. Strepsiades wants to call the boy Pheidonides after his own father, but at the same time alluding to the verb φείδομαι “to save, to be parsimonious”. The final solution Φειδιππίδης links the two meaningful components (φείδομαι and -ιππος) into a single name. A parallel in the papyrological documentation is the family of Greek cavalrymen Stratippos and Neoptolemos: in the first genera- tion, in the mid 3rd cent. BCE the names Neoptolemos son of Stratippos reflect the military status of the family (Strat-(h)ippos = “army-horse”; Neoptolemos = “new-war”), but when the same names recur two generations later, family tradition has taken over.2 As most names, especially Egyptian names, are theophoric (contain a refer- ence to a god) the problem arises whether names were given in the first place for their religious contents (e.g. Isidôros or Peteesis = a child given by Isis) or for local and family traditions. In origin, of course, religious content was typi- cally at the basis of a name, and this is visible in the geographical spread of personal names referring to local gods, such as Montou (only in the Theban area) or Souchos and Chnoum (especially popular in the Fayum and in the

1 Ar., Nu. 46–65. 2 Clarysse 1988.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004381346_008 Isis Names in Graeco-Roman Egypt 199 region of Elephantine respectively), but once a pattern was established names could continue to be used even after the religious background had disap- peared.3 Thus in Christian times Paesis or Patermouthis no longer refer to the pagan goddesses Isis and Thermouthis, but to local saints, and then a new onomastic tradition is set. Already in far earlier times royal names such as Amasis (Ỉʿḥ-ms = “born from Iah”), Thoutmosis (Ḏḥwty-ms = “born from Thoth”) or Oaphres (Wȝḥ-ỉb-Rʿ = “the heart of Ra is kind”) refer to pharaohs of the past, not to a cult of the moon god Iah, Thoth or Ra, whereas the popularity of Inaros (Ỉr.t-Ḥr-r.r=w = “the eye of Horos is against them”) and Petobastis (Pȝ-dỉ-Bȝst.t = “given by Bastet”) is probably due to famous heroes of Demotic stories rather than to the cults of Horos and Bastet.4 On the whole it is impossible for modern scholars to determine how far theophoric names are directly related to cult practice or rather are traditional within some regions or social groups.

2 Theophoric Names in Graeco-Roman Egypt and the Use of Trismegistos

In Egypt, theophoric names constitute as many as 60% of Egyptian (109,494/ 180,570) and more than 40% of Greek onomastic references (78,749/197,927, that is exactly 42.6%). For the present occasion,5 I have mapped, over a period of nearly a thousand years, all the personal names within Egypt which may include a mention of the goddess Isis, analysing how they were spread in place, in time, and according to sex, ethnic and social groups. In 2008, on the occasion of the 4th International Conference of Isis Studies, I presented in Liège together with Mario Paganini a similar study concerning Isis’ paredros, Sarapis,6 collecting manually in a “small” database 6,900 references to 4,850 persons. Now I can avail myself of the PEOPLE database of Trismegistos,7 which includes references to all the known persons in Graeco- Roman Egypt over the whole period: that is about 500,000 references to 370,000 persons.

3 For Greece proper, the problem is discussed by Parker 2000; for typical names of the Theban area, see Clarysse 1984. 4 Ryholt 2010, 436–437. 5 With thanks to Yanne Broux for reading and correcting an earlier draft of the paper. 6 Now published in Clarysse & Paganini 2009. Six years later the computerised database of Trismegistos lists 5,674 persons, with 7,655 references. 7 See http://www.trismegistos.org/index.html.