Ren (Egyptian mythology)
| Reindeer in hieroglyphics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
rn name |
|||
Ren means name in ancient Egyptian .
A person's name had a special meaning in ancient Egypt . At birth, children were usually given two names: Only the mother knew the first name (it was the actual name of a person). With him, it is believed, the person in heaven was called. With the second name, however, the child and the later adult were called in this world.
If you cast a spell on a person, it was only effective if it contained the "real" name. The goddess Isis was also called "She who knows all names" - no one could escape her magic . The name, like the shadow or the shelter , was part of the essence of a person, was sometimes even equated with the soul of a person and was thus also one of the components of the cult of the dead . "Whose name is pronounced lives", according to the ancient Egyptian belief. Whose name, on the other hand, was deleted from the inscriptions, should be prevented from continuing to live in the afterlife , as in the case of Hatshepsut and Akhenaten . This "erasure of memory" was later referred to with the Latin term Damnatio memoriae .
Web links
literature
- Hans Bonnet : Name . In: Lexicon of Egyptian Religious History (3rd edition) . Nikol, Berlin 2000, ISBN 978-3-937872-08-7 , pp. 501-504.
- Eleanor L. Harris: Ancient Egyptian Divination and Magic. Weiser, York Beach 1998, p. 7.
- Christian Jacq : The world of hieroglyphics. Rowohlt, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-871-34-365-X , pp. 141-145.
- Gerald Massey: A Book of the Beginnings. Vol. 1, Cosimo, New York 2007, p. 235 ( online ).
- Pascal Vernus: naming. In: Wolfhart Westendorf , Wolfgang Helck (ed.): Lexikon der Ägyptologie , Vol. 4. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1982, Sp. 326–333.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Marinkowic: Concepts of the Soul in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean World. In: Christian Kanzian, Muhammad Legenhausen (ed.): Soul. A Comparative Approach. Ontos, Heusenstamm 2010, pp. 157–174, here p. 159 ( online ).
- ↑ Robert Morkot: The Egyptians. An Introduction. Routledge, Abingdon 2005, p. 213.