Name and Identity
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| Menes in hieroglyphs |
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The commonly used Menes derives from Manetho, an Egyptian historian and priest who lived during the Ptolemaic period. Manetho used the name in the form Μήνης ( Mênês). An alternative Greek form, Μιν ( Min), was cited by the 5th-century BCE historian Herodotus, a variant no longer considered the result of contamination from the name of the god Min.
The Egyptian form, Meni, is taken from the Turin and Abydos king lists (dated Dynasty XIX).
The name, Menes, means "He who endures", which, Edwards (1971) suggests, may have been coined as "a mere descriptive epithet denoting a semi-legendary hero whose name had been lost". Rather than a particular person, the name may conceal collectively the protodynastic pharaohs Ka, Scorpion and Narmer.
Read more about this topic: Meni
Famous quotes containing the words name and and/or identity:
“Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore than name. Are they all alike. I think so.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)