🔼The name Egypt: Summary
- Meaning
- Temple of Ptah
- Married To Tragedy
- Etymology
- From the Egyptian Hwt-Ptah, via the Greek Αιγυπτος (Aiguptos).
- From αιγειος (aigeios), of goat, the wife of τραγος (tragos), he-goat.
🔼Etymology of the name Egypt
According to the Oxford Companion to the Bible, the name Egypt is an English rendering of the Greek name Αιγυπτος (Aiguptos), which in turn is a transliteration of the Egyptian Hwt-Ptah, meaning Temple of Ptah. Ptah was Egypt's creator-god who had created the world via his thought and his word, and he also became patron of craftsmen.
To a creative Greek, the name Αιγυπτος (Aiguptos) would probably have sounded somewhat similar to the adjective αιγειος (aigeios), meaning of goat, from the noun αιξ (aix), meaning she-goat. Not only would our name have sounded like Goat-i-stan, but the husband of the αιξ (aix) was the τραγος (tragos), he-goat, from which comes the familiar noun τραγωδια (tragodia), tragedy, literally: goat-song. That means that to the right kind of ears, the name Egypt would probably have sounded like Place Married To Tragedy (see our article on the name Agrippa for a more thorough look at this).
Obviously, the familiar observation that the Creator called his Son — which would be the embodiment of the collective human understanding of the Creator (Romans 1:20, Colossians 2:9) — out of Egypt speaks of the natural evolution of scientific thought much rather than of some religion.
The Egyptians themselves named their country Keme, meaning the Black Land.
In the Hebrew Bible the country of Egypt is always denoted by the name Mizraim. In the Greek New Testament, the name Αιγυπτος (Aiguptos) is used 29 times; see full concordance
Read our articles on the word Exodus or the name Pharaoh for a lengthy look at the function of Egypt in the Bible.