Naville, Edouard: The store-city of Pithom and the route of the Exodus (London, 1888)

STORE-CITY OF PITHOM AND

THE EOTJTE OF THE EXODUS.

7

above. At tlie time of the XlXth dynasty, on
the fragment of the shrine of Rameses II., it is a

borderland <2 j (PI. III.). In the monuments
of a later epoch it is mentioned as the civil
name of the capital and of the district around

it; it occurs as ' ^

The instances are so numerous

that they cannot be quoted here. The name
is generally connected with the god Turn ; Turn
the great god of Thuku, or the great god who
resides in Thukut, or the great god the living

(^~) of Thuku. In the great tablet it occurs
more than a dozen times; the determi-
natives © and D^=a apply both to a city and to
a land of some extent.

M. Brugsch, in his extensive researches on
the Geography of Egypt, first drew the attention
of Egyptologists to the Hebrew word corre-
sponding to Thuku or Thuket. The letter s=s
which was pronounced th, is often transcribed
in Greek and Coptic by <x; and in Hebrew by
D.1 The name of XefiivvvTos, Sebennytus, Theb

neter C s=> J © is a striking proof of the truth

of this assertion, which is corroborated by the
spelling of many common names. I need not
dwell on this philological demonstration, which
seems to me quite conclusive. The transcrip-
tion of Thukut would be the Hebrew nisp Suc-
coth.2 It is not at all surprising that the
Hebrew word should mean tents. We have
here an example of a philological accident
which constantly occurs in mythology and
geography. A name passing from a language
to another keeps nearly the same sound and
the same appearance, but it undergoes a change
just sufficient to give it a sense in the language

1 Brugsch, " Aeg. Zeitschr." 1875, p. 7.

- Rev. H. G. Tomkins has pointed out that we have the
Assyrian transcription of Succoth in the IsJchut of Esar-
haddon. Academy, March 3, 1883.

of the people who have adopted the word.
The new sense may be totally different from
the original.3 It is the same with the name of

Moses, in Egyptian (j)P^j^ mesu, the cJiild
or the hoy, which the Hebrews converted into
n#D, Mosheh, " drawn out of the water," a turn
of meaning which of course has nothing to do
with the Egyptian word.

We have seen in the lists that the religious
name of the city was Pithom, and a papyrus
says that it belonged to Thuku. The same in-
formation is derived from our monuments.
The name of Pithom occurs first on the statue
of the lieutenant of Osorkon II., Ankh renp
nefer, who was also the good recorder of Pithom,

^y3 . The name is mentioned three times

in this form in the texts of the statue. It
occurs twice in the great tablet of Philadelphus

as '""H?) , with the determinative of a city:

once 4 when the rents granted to the city are
spoken of, and farther5 when priests and
statues placed before the gods of Pithom of

°° i ^ are mentioned :

Thukut <=> ^ I
^ i

l

just as we found in the papyrus Anastasi.
Just as in the lists also, the name of Pithom

occurs with the variant Ha Turn ^ ^ ^unr' ^
divine abode of Turn, the great god who resides
in Thuku.6

In order to complete the evidence derived
from the agreement of the inscriptions dis-
covered with the texts known before, I shall
now review the other geographical names
which belong to the nome.

The name of the nome itself jj^ is

found in the first line of the great tablet, show-
ing that it is to the gods of the Ylllth nome

3 Cf. the very good remarks on this point in Lenormanl,
"Les Origines de l'histoire," 2nd ed., ii, p. 171.
* PL IX., 1. 10.
■' PI. IX., 1. 13.
0 PL V. a, pi. VII. a, 2, 3.