200 years ago
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Decoding of the Rosetta Stone
QUOTE
Champollion’s breakthrough is celebrated as one of history’s great “lightbulb” moments: It occurred on September 14, 1822, when he fully deciphered the name Ramses in a hieroglyphic text from the Abu Simbel temple complex built by Ramses II (“the Great”). Champollion realized the name was formed by a combination of “figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once.” Filled with joy, he cried, “Je tiens l’affaire—I’ve got it!” Days later, he wrote his “Lettre à M. Dacier,” the secretary of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris with a list of 25 confirmed phonetic signs in demotic script and hieroglyphs.The word Ramses is a good example of the complexity of the system whose workings Champollion had laid bare. It is written as ra-mes-su. The word ra (in hieroglyphs and Coptic) means “sun.” Mes is both a sound sign and a meaning sign (ideogram). Mes meant “gave birth to, or created” (a verb), and su means “him” (a pronoun). Signs, therefore, played different roles in hieroglyphics. They were not all purely symbolic or phonetic representations: Phonetic signs could stand for one, two, or three sounds, while other signs were homophones, different signs for the same sounds.
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That's cool. "The sun gave birth to him."
Years ago, I listened to a course on the Old Testament. The lecturer commented that "Moses" has the same root as Ramses. Also, according to the lecturer, it has relevance to being "out of the water" which fits with the birth story of Moses. Not sure if that's true, but I found it interesting nevertheless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses
An Egyptian root msy ('child of') has been considered as a possible etymology, arguably an abbreviation of a theophoric name, as for example in Egyptian names like Thutmoses ('child of Thoth') and Ramesses ('child of Ra'), with the god's name omitted. Abraham Yahuda, based on the spelling given in the Tanakh, argues that it combines "water" or "seed" and "pond, expanse of water," thus yielding the sense of "child of the Nile" (mw-š). However, Kenneth Kitchen argued that an Egyptian origin for the name was unlikely, as the sounds in the Hebrew m-š-h do not correspond to the pronunciation of Egyptian msy in the relevant time period.[26]
The biblical account of Moses' birth provides him with a folk etymology to explain the ostensible meaning of his name. He is said to have received it from the Pharaoh's daughter: "he became her son. She named him Moses [מֹשֶׁה, Mōše], saying, 'I drew him out [מְשִׁיתִֽהוּ, mǝšīṯīhū] of the water'."[28][29] This explanation links it to the Semitic root משׁה, m-š-h, meaning "to draw out". The eleventh-century Tosafist Isaac b. Asher haLevi noted that the princess names him the active participle 'drawer-out' (מֹשֶׁה, mōše), not the passive participle 'drawn-out' (נִמְשֶׁה, nīmše), in effect prophesying that Moses would draw others out (of Egypt); this has been accepted by some scholars.[
