Is the root meaning of NTR/Neter (god) => Nut/Neith/Hathor + Ra/Horus?

[Rakovsky]

Currently scholars do not have a consensus on the origin of the meaning of NTR. This is the Egyptian word for God, for a deity, or for a divine object. It is spelled NTR in hieroglyphics and pronounced Neter.

Some scholars post the theory that NTR means nature, element, or principle.
One reason they do so is because commonly in practice there are gods associated with various elements or principles. For example, there is a "god" of the sun - Ra, a "god" of justice, a "god" of the earth - Geb, a "god" of the primordial waters. Each of these "gods" were often given different stories or myths, like Ra riding a barque in the heavens.

For example, Shingai Rukwata Ndoro writes in the Sunday Mail (June 14, 2015):

Neteru is the plural for the ancient Egyptian divinity or sum of divine energies. The hieroglyph for ‘Ntr’ looks like a flag. ‘Ntr’ is also the force of nature (from Latin, ‘natura,’ which means “birth, essence”). The ancient Egyptian sum of divine energies (“neteru”) humanised aspects of an impersonal cosmic energy or life force whose behaviour created and sustains life and the universe. Attributes and functions of such an impersonal cosmic energy or life force were also presented as animals. Contrary to a falsified explanation, ancient Egyptians did not have numerous divinities but they humanised the various attributes of the cosmic energy or life force, the One (the duality of “Neter-Netert”) in the All (“Neteru”).

According to the 17th chapter of the “Book of the Dead,” the First Order and Cause of Nature consisted of eight cosmic energies (Neter-Netri) (NTR) or divinities.
http://www.sundaymail.co.zw/origins-of-miraculous-conception-in-ancient-egypt

There was in fact a myth in Egypt as she says that 8 primordial deities, four pairs of males and females, existed before the Creation was formed into the world we know it. So for example one pair was Nun/Nunet, referring to the primordial waters.

Francisco Tomás Verdú Vicente talks about famous Egyptologist Budge's view in the journal MEDICINA NATURISTA, 2011; Vol. 5 - N.º 2: 80-81, and associates NTR with Nature:

The term nature comes from the word Egyptian ntr and it means God... The notion expressed by nutar as substantive and nutra as adjective or verb should be looked for in the coptic Nout...

Wallis Budge, the great Egyptologist that he was, recognized something fundamental about the word natura: "Another definition of the word [NTR], given by Brugsch, means 'active energy that produces and creates things regular recurrence; which gives them new life and gives them back their youthful vigor' and adds that the innate concept of the word completely covers the φυσιζ original meaning of the Greek word and Latin natura.

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/3695453.pdf

The book Religion and the Order of Nature by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University) says:

...there are basic principles concerning the order of nature that continue through these transformations, such as the identification of cosmic elements with real divinities possessing a personal existence. Most important of these principles for the understanding of the order of nature is the Neter , which has received many interpretations, some even equating it with the Hebrew Wl. The Neter is a principle conveyed by a sign, the hieroglyph being itself called Medu-Neteru. It is the Idea of which a material object is the crystallization.
...
The order of nature is the reflection of the order that belongs to the realm of the principles or Neteru, which man also carries within his being as a consequence of his central position in the cosmic order. 'Every natural type is a revelation of one of the natures and abstract functions that rule the world, a verb of the divine language —that is, the entities or fully realized Principles (Neteru).

And a review of the book The Temple in Man by R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz says:

Schwaller de Lubicz explains in Le Temple de l'Homme (Caracteres, 1957) that in the ancient temple civilization of Egypt, numbers, our most ancient form of symbol, did not simply designate quantities but instead were considered to be concrete definitions of energetic formative principles of nature. The Egyptians called these energetic principles Neters, a word which is conventionally rendered as "gods." To conform with the true meaning of the symbol in ancient Egypt, we ought to use the Egyptian term Medu-Neteru, the Greek translation of which, "heiroglyphs," distorts the Egyptian meaning. Medu-Neteru are the Neters, or the principles conveyed by a sign.
...
"'Divine" man (without this part of the brain ) represents the Principle or Neter, capable of living and acting, but only as the executant of an impulse that he receives; hence, he plays the role of an intermediary between the abstract impulse, outside of Nature, and its execution in Nature, without actual choice. In this regard, this entity has a primitive, and "prenatural" character...

...each of these individual members of the vegetable kingdom belongs to a genus, and this genus to a family; and these families belong to an original "lineage." At the head of this lineage is a Neter, a "Principle" synthesizing all the characteristics of this lineage: its number, its rhythm, its classification in the general harmony. Let us further elucidate, by means of a geometrical image, the role of the Neter as head or Principle of a lineage.

http://www.fatuma.net/text/R.A.Schw...einMan-SacredArchitectureandthePerfectMan.pdf

It's true that some words have come from Egyptian into Western languages. Natron is a chemical, symbolizes as Na, which is a sodium carbonate that was used to preserve mummies. Egyptians thought that the souls of the deceased could become Gods (Neteru). "Natron" is both the same word in English and in Egyptian. It came into English through Greek (as Nitron) and Latin (as Natrium), probably originally from Egyptian.

To give another example, from the name of the god "Hor" (in English Horus), the falcon who was the sun bringing the dawn on the horizon, some words have come into English:
"In time Hor became part of the Latin language and found its place in words such as “horizon”, “horizontal”, “horoscope” and even “hour” in English and “heure” in French."
http://www.astroset.com/bireysel_gelisim/ancient/a22.htm

And to give a third example, a central Egyptian god was Ammon, the God of Thebes, Karnak, and Luxor, whose name Ammon means "the Hidden One". Wikipedia says about this:

The Romans gave the name sal ammoniacus (salt of Amun) to the ammonium chloride deposits that they collected near the Temple of Amun (Greek Ἄμμων Ammon) in ancient Libya.[26] Salts of ammonia have been known from very early times; thus the term Hammoniacus sal appears in the writings of Pliny,[27] although it is not known whether the term is identical with the more modern sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#History

And so one might think that NTR came into Latin as Natura, and then into English as Nature. It's interesting that in Coptic and Egyptian dictionaries we do not find a translation for the English word "nature". Could NTR be that word?

There are several weaknesses to this theory that NTR is "nature". First, the scholars I cited above, with the exception of Budge, are not major Egyptologists.

Secondly, words may appear similar across languages yet have very different meanings. What is pronounced and written "God" in Russian means "year", while in English, "God" means Deity or "the Divine One". In the case of Natura in Latin, it is commonly thought to be a form of the word Natalis, which means "to give birth". So the resemblance between Natura and NTR could be a coincidence.

Third, while it's true that the sun, earth, justice, etc. might be principles or elements, this does not really explain an etymological origin for NTR. That is, how does one go from the concept of elements or principles to phonetically producing the word NTR?

Fourth, in Egyptian thought, the neteru (gods) are not simply elements or principles, but at least within the mythology they are also sentient beings. That is, Ra (literally "sun") is not just the physical sun, but he also interacts with various other deities like Isis, Osiris, and Horus in several myths.

What do you think of this theory that NTR = Natura or Nature?

In the next message I will explain my own theory that NTR = NT + R, that is, the Heavens goddess + the Sun god.

 

[Rakovsky]

Here I will explain my theory that NTR = NTR.

First, I looked at the main terms for god among the major Euroasian ancient civilizations in the time of ancient Egypt. The Sumerians, proto-Turkics, Indo-Europeans (which includes numerous societies like Hindu Indian society, the Celts, the slavs, the Iranians), and Chinese used the terms Dingir, Tengri, Dyeus, and Tien, respectively, for God. Phonetically one can see a trend in the sounds of D, T (an unvoiced D), N, I, and E. In meaning, these terms in their respective languages have consistent secondary meanings of heaven, and they also tend to have associations with stars, brightness, day, sky, or shiny-ness.

Wikipedia mentions the connection between Turkic Tengri, Chinese Tien, and Sumerian Dingir and their connotations in its entry on Tengri:

Other reflexes of the name in modern languages include Mongolian: Тэнгэр ("sky"), Bulgarian: Тангра, Azerbaijani: Tanrı. The Chinese word for "sky" 天 (Mandarin: tiān, Classical Chinese: thīn[4] and Japanese Han Dynasty loanword ten[4]) may also be related, possibly a loan from a prehistoric Central Asian language.

The connection of dingir and Old Turkic tengere was made by F. Hommel in Grundriss der Geographie und Geschichte des alten Orients (1928). P. A. Barton in Semitic and Hamitic Origins (1934) suggested that the Mesopotamian sky god Anu may have been imported from Central Asia to Mesopotamia. The similarity of dingir and tengri was noted as early as 1862 (i.e. during the early phase of the decipherment of the Sumerian language, before even the term "Sumerian" had been coined to refer to it), by George Rawlinson in his The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World (p. 78).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengri

Fred Svenn proposed a connection between Dyeus, Tengri, Tien, and Dingir on his blog about China:

The sign in Sumerian cuneiform (DIĜIR) by itself represents the Sumerian word an (“sky” or “heaven”), the ideogram for An or the word diĝir (“god”), the supreme deity of the Sumerian pantheon. In Assyrian cuneiform, it (AN, DIĜIR) could be either an ideogram for “deity” (ilum) or a syllabogram for an, or ìl-. In Hittite orthography, the syllabic value of the sign was again an.

Tengri, is one of the names for the primary chief deity since the early Turkic (Xiongnu, Hunnic, Bulgar) and Mongolic (Xianbei) peoples. Worship of Tengri is Tengrism. The core beings in Tengrism are Sky-Father (Tengri/Tenger Etseg) and Earth Mother (Eje/Gazar Eej). It involves shamanism, animism, totemism and ancestor worship. The Chinese word for “sky” (Mandarin: tiān, Classical Chinese: thīn and Japanese Han Dynasty loanword ten) may also be related, possibly a loan from a prehistoric Central Asian language. The oldest form of the name is recorded in Chinese annals from the 4th century BC, describing the beliefs of the Xiongnu. It takes the form Cheng-li, which is hypothesized to be a Chinese transcription of Tängri. The Proto-Turkic form of the word has been reconstructed as *Teŋri or *Taŋrɨ. Alternatively, a reconstructed Altaic etymology from *T`aŋgiri (“oath” or “god”) would emphasize the god’s divinity rather than his domain over the sky. The Turkic form, Tengri, is attested in the 11th century by Mahmud al-Kashgari. In modern Turkish, the derived word “Tanrı” is used as the generic word for “god”, or for the Abrahamic God, and is used today by Turkish people to refer to God. The supreme deity of the traditional religion of the Chuvash is Tură. Tengri was the main god of the Turkic pantheon, controlling the celestial sphere. Tengri is considered to be strikingly similar to the Indo-European sky god, *Dyeus, and the structure of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion is closer to that of the early Turks than to the religion of any people of Near Eastern or Mediterranean antiquity.

https://aratta.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/tian-the-oldest-chinese-terms-for-heaven

Turning to Egypt, we find a phonetically similar word being used for god, NTR, bearing sounds similar to those in Tengri, Tien, and Dingir. Since the sounds fit into this pattern, could the meaning of NTR also fit into the pattern of those words' meanings?

With this question in mind, I looked at the deities whose names in Egyptian resembled NTR. Those that start with N include: the male and female pair of gods of the primordial waters Nu and Nunet, the sky/heavens goddess Nut, and the warrior or weaver Neith. In fact, each of the goddesses just mentioned is associated closely with the heavens and the celestial waters.

To give some background on this, the Egyptians personified the celestial waters as Mehet-Weret ("Great Flood"), the sky cow goddess associated with the Milky Way. And Nu, Nunet, Nut, and Neith were all associated or equated with this goddess and with the celestial heavens and their waters. This could be true of Nu (AKA Nun) and Nunet in that Egyptians thought that the primordial waters were raised above the heavens' firmanent. The same idea of the waters over the heavens can be found by the way in Genesis and in Babylonian mythology.

Thanks to the generative powers of the Nun, he was also personified by a Goddess known as Mehet-Weret (The Great Flood), who gave birth to the creator Sun God. Egyptians also thought that because of these powers, Ra returned every night to the watery abyss, so he could be regenerated...

http://www.read-legends-and-myths.com/egyptian-god-nun.html

Another writer talks about this some more, explaining that it was Nu's consort Nunet who was the heavenly waters:

She played the role of sky-goddess over the watery expanse of Nun, paralleling the sky goddess Nut and the earthgod Geb.[1] If Nun was the primeval matter, Naunet could be referred to as primeval space. Naunet remained the heavens above Nun, which had become the okeanos surrounding the land of creation, and above the underworld... http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/religion/nun.htm

It's easy to see that Nut, whose name literally matches the meaning of "sky"/"heavens", lines up with that same meaning in the other ancient religions I mentioned.

Wikipedia explains that the weaver/warrior Neith is portrayed as a goddess of the heavens too:

She is also called such cosmic epithets as the "Cow of Heaven," a sky-goddess similar to Nut, and as the Great Flood, Mehet-Weret (MHt wr.t), as a cow who gives birth to the sun daily. In these forms, she is associated with creation of both the primeval time and daily "re-creation." As protectress of the Royal House, she is represented as a uraeus, and functions with the fiery fury of the sun, In time, this led to her being considered as the personification of the primordial waters of creation. She is identified as a great mother goddess in this role as a creator. As a female deity and personification of the primeval waters, Neith encompasses masculine elements, making her able to give birth (create) without the opposite sex. She is a feminine version of Ptah-Nun, with her feminine nature complemented with masculine attributes symbolized with her association with the bow and arrow. In the same manner, her personification as the primeval waters is Mehetweret (MHt wr.t), the Great Flood, conceptualized as streaming water, related to another use of the verb sti, meaning ‘to pour’."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neith

It explains that she is called the "Opener of the Ways", which is why Neith is associated with the heavens:

The main imagery of Neith as ["Opener of the Ways] was as deity of the unseen and limitless sky, as opposed to Nut and Hathor, who represented the manifested night and day skies, respectively. Her epithet as the "Opener of the Sun’s paths in all her stations" refers to how the sun is reborn (due to seasonal changes) at various points in the sky, beyond this world, of which only a glimpse is revealed prior to dawn and after sunset. It is at these changing points that Neith reigns as a form of sky goddess, where the sun rises and sets daily, or at its ‘first appearance’ to the sky above and below. It is at these points, beyond the sky that is seen, that her true power as deity who creates life is manifested. Georges St. Clair (Creation Records, 1898) noted that Neith is represented at times as a cow goddess with a line of stars across her back...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neith

By the way, in late Egyptian, the R was dropped from NTR and the word was changed from Neter into Noute, as it remains today among Copts. The word Noute brings to mind the goddess Nut (pronounced Newt). It's also interesting that Neith's sign is a combination of a bow and arrows resembling an asterisk, and that the sign for Dingir looks a bit like a combination of arrows:

Neith

Dingir

In any case, we can arrive at associating NTR with the heavens ("Nut") not only by (1) looking at the meanings of Dingir, Tengri, Tien, and Dyeus in their own cultures, but by noting that (2) the deities whose names resemble NTR are sky/heavens goddesses.

 

[Rakovsky]

Now let's consider:

Where does the R come from in NTR in this theory?
Following a similar approach of looking for gods with fitting names, we come across Ra, whose name means "sun". Certainly Ra is also associated with the day, with brightness, shinyness, and with the sky, although strictly speaking "Ra" does not mean "sky." Consider also that major myths and concepts about Nut and Neith include the concept of Ra entering and traveling through them each day. That is, these central myths involve the concept of NT (heavens) combining with Ra (sun).

This close relationship is shown with the gods Hor (meaning "falcon"; in English Horus) and Hathor. First, notice the "r" in Hor, and notice that Hor is commonly considered an aspect of Ra, sometimes called Ra-Horakhty, representing Ra when he is rising on the horizon. Now ask; Who is Hathor? Hathor literally means "Mansion of Horus". But Hathor is also equated in mythology with Nut, Neith, and the celestial cow goddess, as she is usually depicted. So "Mansion of Horus" becomes in effect another name for Nut and the heavens. Thus NT (Neith or Nut) is not only the heavens, but in practice she is also Ra's or Horus' mansion.

In the entry below you can see that the hieroglyphic for Hathor is a falcon ("Hor") inside a box, representing the mansion:

Hathor (meaning "mansion of Horus") is an Ancient Egyptian goddess who personified the principles of joy, feminine love, and motherhood... Hathor is commonly depicted as a cow goddess with horns in which is set a sun disk with Uraeus. ... Hathor may be the cow goddess who is depicted ... on a stone urn dating from the 1st dynasty that suggests a role as sky-goddess and a relationship to Horus who, as a sun god, is "housed" in her. The Ancient Egyptians viewed reality as multi-layered in which deities who merge for various reasons, while retaining divergent attributes and myths, were not seen as contradictory but complementary. In a complicated relationship Hathor is at times the mother, daughter and wife of Ra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor

Note what it says above about deities merging. In this sense the sun-wearing Hathor, as the "mansion of Hor", reflects a concept that brings together Ra and Hor on one hand and Nut/Neith on the other.

What about grammatically? Can NTR be a combined word? This is an interesting question. We know that Egyptians had combining gods and doing so in their names, like combining Amun and Ra into a God called Amun-Ra. True, those are both male gods. But the Egyptians did not rule out androgynous gods, as Neith was sometimes said to have a phallus as a creator.

 

[1137]

I don't see it.

 

[Rakovsky]

I don't see it.

What do you see as the most likely meaning of NTR/Neter in its etymology?

 

[1137]

What do you see as the most likely meaning of NTR/Neter in its etymology?

I think they're comparable to Platonic Forms, and in fact inspired the idea.

 

[GoodbyeDave]

The problems here are that (1) you are relying on unscholarly sources and (2) you are making impressionistic comparisons between sounds. I'll just pick some examples to show what's gone wrong.

Horizon has nothing to do with Horus. It's a Greek word from the root hor- "boundary". For that matter, Horus in Classical Egyptian had an -a-, not an -o-.

Nature has nothing to do with neter. It's from the Latin word natus "born".

The Egyptian ntr (strictly transcribed nṯr, which may not appear on your computer) did not originally have a -t-, although one had developed by Roman times. The original middle consonant was -k- which was first palatalised and eventually merged with -t-. Cleopatra would have used a -t-, but not Tutankhamen.

One of the problems with Egyptian is that the Egyptologists, faced with a language which only wrote vowels and had some very difficult consonants, have evolved a conventional pronunciation which bears little relation to anything you could have heard in Egypt. The pronunciation "neter" is an example: the "e"s are just inserted to make the word pronounceable. The first vowel was actually "a" and we can't be sure about the second. Similarly "ra" is a convention for r‘ where the second symbol represents a guttural consonant absent from European languages. The vowel in the middle was actually "i". So, if the word for god incorporated the word for sun it would have been written nṯr‘ and it wasn't.

 

[Rakovsky]

I think they're comparable to Platonic Forms, and in fact inspired the idea.

Theory of Forms - Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms
"Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas argues that non-physical (but substantial) forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate reality."

Yes, I can see a similarity - gods of the sun, earth, justice, primeval waters and ideas/forms of the same.

This is basically what I see Ndoro, Vicente, and the others arguing as I mentioned in my first post - NTR = element/principle/nature.

Issues or challenges that I see include the way that the gods are personalized and the question of what the etymological correspondence is. How does the word "NTR" phonetically relate to any other word that means nature/"Platonic form"/element/principle?

In the myths, the gods are not just described, but they act like people, have stories, have discussions, etc. They sound like thinking, sentient, conscious beings. But can we correctly say that Thoth as a Platonic form is a self-conscious being? Can the details of each major myth be correlated to something that a Platonic form actually does?

 

[Rakovsky]

Hello, David.

You write:

The problems here are that (1) you are relying on unscholarly sources and (2) you are making impressionistic comparisons between sounds.

I understand that you are skeptical about my theory because of a lack of scholarly sources and what you find to be unrelated sounds as part of the theory.

The first step I took in my own theory that NTR = NT (heavens)+R (sun) was to see a connection or pattern between proto-Turkic Tengri, Sumerian Dingir, Indo-European Dyeus, and Chinese Tien. To begin with, what do you think of the philologists' belief that Dingir and Tengri are related? Let me provide some quotes

Wikipedia's article on Dingir says:

The original association of "divinity" is thus with "bright" or "shining" hierophanies in the sky. A possible loan relation of Sumerian dingir with Turkic Tengri "sky, sky god" has been suggested.[4]

Mircea Eliade, John C. Holt, Patterns in comparative religion, 1958, p. 94. The connection of dingir and Old Turkic tengere was made by F. Hommel in Grundriss der Geographie und Geschichte des alten Orients (1928). P. A. Barton in Semitic and Hamitic Origins (1934) suggested that the Mesopotamian sky god Anu may have been imported from Central Asia to Mesopotamia. The similarity of dingir and tengri was noted as early as 1862 (i.e. during the early phase of the decipherment of the Sumerian language, before even the term "Sumerian" had been coined to refer to it), by George Rawlinson in his The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World (p. 78).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingir

That is, the association between the two has long been a view in linguistic circles.

Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, Volume 19 says:

"it is clear that digiru comes in the same manner from the Sumerian dingir (Turkish tengri) god, as hilibu from another Sumerian word gilib, god. We have here beyond doubt the old Turkish gilib lord, god (comp. celebi, god-ful elefantin modern Arabic of Syria selebi, beautiful), which expression was originally in use with the Turks of Asia Minor and Armenia, as tengri with the Turks of Central Asia."

SOURCE:
https://books.google.com/books?id=m8xEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=tengri+dingir&source=bl&ots=OyGYAIf9HG&sig=ocyGCYWU--VwLiWMu4va8qXi07Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwia6fzcqrHOAhVF4CYKHcdRAFwQ6AEIjAEwFQ#v=onepage&q=tengri dingir&f=false

That is, the scholars relate not only Sumerian Dingir to Tukric Tengri, but Sumerian gilib to old Turkish gilib.

Archibald Sayce writes in Principles of Comparative Philology:

• In spite of the wide interval in time, space, and social relations, Dr. Hommel believes himself able to point out many words of this sort which are common to Akkadian and the modern Turkic languages of Central Asia. THis is more especially the case with the numerals. Common roots have also been pointed out between Accadian and the Uralic idioms of Northern Russia and Finland; "pi" "the ear" for example reappears in the Votiak "pel"; kats "two" is the Estonian kats, like dingir, god, the Turkish tengri, heaven.

That is, he finds correspondence to be especially common between numbers with Turkic and Akkadian, but also with the word Dingir/Tengri. It is interesting that the language family of Sumerian has never been established, to the point where it is often considered an isolate.

The Journal of Philology, vol 3 says something similar about Akkadian and Turkic, particularly focusing on Dingir/Tengri:

• The ordinary Accadian word for god, however was dingir, which in later times became dimir. The root is a widespread one: Tatar tengri (god), Turk. tangri (heaven), Jakut tangara (heaven, holy) Fin. taimas, perhaps even Samoiedian adjaan. It has been borrowed by the Chinese under the form tien. It is to be noticed that the same law of corruption seems to have been at work in the Accadian and the Finnish. Before the plural affix -ene, Dimir becomes dimirri. Sometimes the i-e is contracted; kharra (prince) becomes karrine (princes).

Turkish scholar Harun Gungor has an article that mentions the question of the relationship between Dingir and Tengri, although I don't have access to it:
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=231382

This looks like a cool video and interesting video on the question. Anyone know Turkish?

What do you think of these scholars' views on the connection between Tengri and Dingir?

 

[Rakovsky]

The Egyptian ntr (strictly transcribed nṯr, which may not appear on your computer) did not originally have a -t-, although one had developed by Roman times. The original middle consonant was -k- which was first palatalised and eventually merged with -t-. Cleopatra would have used a -t-, but not Tutankhamen.

How do we know that NTR was written as NKR? If that is not what you mean, what do you think the consonants were in the Old Kingdom or first-fifth dynasties?

James Allen writes in his book Middle Egyptian that mdw-ntr was the Egyptian word for hieroglyphics and literally meant "God's words".

Similarly "ra" is a convention for r‘ where the second symbol represents a guttural consonant absent from European languages. The vowel in the middle was actually "i". So, if the word for god incorporated the word for sun it would have been written nṯr‘ and it wasn't.

Here is a video about the pronunciation of this guttural sound called 'Ayn in Arabic:

I think they write it with a "3" when Arabs write in English letters to spell their words.

It is impressive that you are so familiar with Egyptian. Do Hathor and Horus also end with an 'Ayn?

 

[Rakovsky]

Here I will upload scholarly references on NTR's meaning I found as an attachment.

I found Tobin's book Theological principles of Egyptian religion speculates about the origin of the term NTR, but I don't have the book. Nor do I have Hornung's "Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, The One and the Many", which discusses it.

A major avenue I see for looking for the etymological meaning would be to consider languages that are closest to Egyptian and what words are similar to NTR (or NKL if NTR took that form in earlier times as the scholar Thomas Schneider wrote).

Wikipedia lists:

Major Afroasiatic languages
Berber

• Kabyle
• Riffian
• Shawiya
• Shilha
• Tuareg

Chadic

• Hausa

Cush-itic

• Afar
• Beja
• Oromo
• Somali

Egyptian

• Coptic
• Ancient Egyptian

Omotic?

• Wolaytta

Semitic

• Akkadian
• Amharic
• Arabic (Varieties of Arabic)
• Aramaic (Assyrian Neo-Aramaic)
• Ge'ez
• Hebrew
• Phoenician
• Tigrinya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language

Interrelations between branches of Afro-Asiatic.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages

Based on Wikipedia, it sounds like the Chadic languages are closest to Egyptian, although I know that geographically Cush-ite and Berber languages are closer.

 

[Rakovsky]

Bearing in mind the possible Chadic, Cush-ite, or Berber correspondences for the word NTR, I looked for other African words with potential related meanings.

Professor Catherine Acholonu writes about Neter and about Ptah, the craftsman deity of Egypt and their relationship to the Niger language Igbo, which however is not classed in the Afroasiatic language group like Egyptian is:

• The Egyptian word for ‘gods’ is NTR or Neter.... Its Igbo equivalent/original is Onetara (meaning – ‘He who guards and watches’ over a thing on behalf of someone else). The Igbo original is more explicit, for it shows that these lesser gods are answerable to a Higher Being. ... The highest and oldest of the known gods of Egypt was Ptah. He was the father of all the other gods. ... The Igbo original of this word is Okpu-atu (meaning ‘He who moulds/fashions things by carving and opening up’. Igbo word tuo/atu means both ‘to carve and to open a hole’).

The essay African Origins of the Word God compares words similar in phonetics and meaning to god/NTR in African languages.
http://www.asarimhotep.com/documentdownloads/AfricanOriginsoftheWordGod.pdf

I found a webpage called The De-agglutination and Agglutination of the Emblem of Divinity NTJR, NTR. The essay talks about the meaning in light of other African words, but I don't know how authoritative it is as scholarship (no offense to the author).
http://www.kaa-umati.co.uk/god_ntr.htm

Budge's essay on the topic can be found here:
NETER. THE EGYPTIAN WORD FOR GOD BY E. A. WALLIS BUDGE
The Monist; Vol. 13, No. 4 (July, 1903), pp. 481-492; Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27899432

 

[GoodbyeDave]

On the word for Sun
The "a" is use to represent the hand hieroglyph which we know to be very similar to or the same as the Semitic ayn because the Egyptian symbol was used to transcribe the Phoenician letter and the Egyptian sound was transcribed by the Hebrew letter. Looking at related words in Semitic and Egyptian, we can see that it was originally a "d". We know the vowel was "i" from Egyptian names written in Cuneiform script. So, Cleopatra said "re", Tutankhamen said "ri’" and Cheops said "rid".

On the word for god
The consonant in the middle became "t", hence the Coptic word "nuti". Egyptologists pronounce it like the English "ch". Comparisons with other Afroasiatic languages show that it corresponds to an original "k" followed by an "i" or "u". The sequence of changes would be k > ky > t. The stressed "nu" in Coptic comes from a classical "na". The word has an irregular plural in Coptic, "nter" showing the classical plural had a stressed "u" in the second syllable. This suggests that the oldest, preclassical form was probably "nakur". Therefore it cannot be related to words with a -t- in the middle! It certainly cannot be related to an Igbo word, as Igbo is not an Afroasiatic language, but a Niger-Congo one.

Hornung wrote

...attempts to define the meaning of nṯr in etymological terms have not been convincing.
Attempts to find an illuminating etymology ... within the Afro-Asiatic language family have so far not been any more successful.
The conclusion is virtually inescapable that neither the etymology not the "original meaning" can be established...

Sources again!
These reconstructions are based on the work of living scholars like Antonio Loprieno and Carsten Peust. The works of Budge (a century ago) and Sayce (the book quoted was written in 1874!) are obsolete.

 

[Rakovsky]

On the word for Sun
The "a" is use to represent the hand hieroglyph which we know to be very similar to or the same as the Semitic ayn because the Egyptian symbol was used to transcribe the Phoenician letter and the Egyptian sound was transcribed by the Hebrew letter. Looking at related words in Semitic and Egyptian, we can see that it was originally a "d". We know the vowel was "i" from Egyptian names written in Cuneiform script. So, Cleopatra said "re", Tutankhamen said "ri’" and Cheops said "rid".

Hello, David!
I can understand a theory that Ra originally was Ri or Rid. I know that the Chinese word for sun is "Ri" and that it was drawn in the Oracle Bones the same way the Egyptians did.

I would ask about this: The Egyptians were writing in hieroglyphics that we have today in their surviving records from 2500 to 1000 BC.
If they were pronouncing Ra as Ri or Rid, wouldn't that show up in the hieroglyphics we have from their generation? Wouldn't they be writing R D instead of R 'Ayn, whiich is pronounced as R3a, the 3 being the 'Ayn or guttural A?

On the word for god
The consonant in the middle became "t", hence the Coptic word "nuti". Egyptologists pronounce it like the English "ch". Comparisons with other Afroasiatic languages show that it corresponds to an original "k" followed by an "i" or "u". The sequence of changes would be k > ky > t.

I think one of the questions would be at what point the k was still a k. I understand that a proto-African-Asiatic language from which the Egyptians came might talk that way, but did the Egyptians talk that way and when exactly did they make that change from K to T?

Because maybe it was Nuk/Neik/Nunek and NKR in the preclassical time, or else they thought up the names Nut/Neith after they had already made the change from Nkr to Ntr or concurrently.
That would allow NTR to be related to words with a -t- in the middle.

The stressed "nu" in Coptic comes from a classical "na". The word has an irregular plural in Coptic, "nter" showing the classical plural had a stressed "u" in the second syllable. This suggests that the oldest, preclassical form was probably "nakur".

So Coptic Nuti came from an Egyptian word of Nater from the classical period?

Do you know if the R suffix at the end of Egyptian words has any particular meaning? Could we be talking about NT- or NK- with an R suffix at the end?

Hornung wrote
Attempts to find an illuminating etymology ... within the Afro-Asiatic language family have so far not been any more successful.

This list of African words looked interesting to me:

Twi ntoro ―spirit of patrilineage‖
Yorùbá ntori ―because‖
Lugbara adro ―guardian spirit‖ Adro ―God‖ (also the whirlwind found in rivers) 9
Mbuti Ndura ―God‖ (<of th e rainforest)
ciLuba Ndele ―divine , begetter, Ancestor ‖
Gurma Unteru ―God‖
Gurmantche Untenu ―God‖
Fulani Ntori ―God‖
Masai Naiteru ―God‖
Kwasio Nture ―sacred‖
Mombutu Noro ―God‖
Ewe Tre ―clan spirit, fetish‖
Ijo Toru ―river‖ (Egyptian i - trw ―river‖) 10
Tonga Tilo ―blue sky, God‖ (from which the rains fall)
Amarigna 11 An ä T ä ra ―pure‖
Wolof Twr ―protecting god, totem‖ Twr ―libation‖ (Egyptian twr ―libation‖)

http://www.asarimhotep.com/documentdownloads/AfricanOriginsoftheWordGod.pdf

Do you think it's more likely than not that an important word like God would have analogies or connections to other Afroasiatic words resembling NKL/NKR/NTR/NTL, perhaps without the last letter R/L ?

Sources again!

What did you think of the philologists' writings I quoted that said Tengri and Dingir was related? For me, seeing relationships between words like that was a jumping-off point.
For example, The Journal of Philology, vol 3 says:

• The ordinary Accadian word for god, however was dingir, which in later times became dimir. The root is a widespread one: Tatar tengri (god), Turk. tangri (heaven), Jakut tangara (heaven, holy) Fin. taimas, perhaps even Samoiedian adjaan. It has been borrowed by the Chinese under the form tien. It is to be noticed that the same law of corruption seems to have been at work in the Accadian and the Finnish. Before the plural affix -ene, Dimir becomes dimirri. Sometimes the i-e is contracted; kharra (prince) becomes karrine (princes).

The Turkish scholar Harun Gungor has an article that mentions the relationship between Dingir and Tengri:
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=231382

John Forlong's Encyclopedia of Religions, vol. 1 proposes:

• Dimir. Dingir. Akkadian: god, Turkish tengri. the root means strong, ( as in Akkadian Dingir-mas, Turkish Tingir, iron): but Dim means to form or make and the word has been rendered Dimir maker and Tingir life maker. The name is also the Hunnish Tang-li and Yacut Tangara.
  

The works of Budge (a century ago) and Sayce (the book quoted was written in 1874!) are obsolete.

Didn't Hornung quote earlier generations of Egyptologists with respect, even if he did not agree with them?

 

[GoodbyeDave]

If they were pronouncing Ra as Ri or Rid, wouldn't that show up in the hieroglyphics we have from their generation? Wouldn't they be writing R D instead of R 'Ayn, whiich is pronounced as R3a, the 3 being the 'Ayn or guttural A?

No. The spelling stayed the same but the pronunciation changed. The "arm & hand" symbol originally represented /d/; when it changed to a guttural there was no reason to change the spelling. Think about modern languages: the Portuguese "rio" is pronounced "khiu" in Brazil, but they don't change the spelling, any more than we write "nite" for "knight".

I think one of the questions would be at what point the k was still a k.

It's more a question of when the palatal merged with a /t/. The two consonants are never confused by scribes in the New Kingdom, so the change took place after 1000 BC. In order for the word to be related to similar words in other languages there would have to have been a /t/ in prehistoric times, or the word in the other language would have to be a loan from late spoken Egyptian.

What did you think of the philologists' writings I quoted that said Tengri and Dingir was related?

It's possible. Sumerian is a complete mystery of a language which doesn't show any relations to any other. There might be a relation, or it might be sheer chance. The two "warning examples" they always quote are the English words "bad", which also exists in Persian, and "dog", which also exists in an Australian language. In fact both cases are coincidence: in the past, the words were pronounced differently.

Didn't Hornung quote earlier generations of Egyptologists with respect, even if he did not agree with them?

Yes, but on matters of culture and religion, which is his main interest. Linguistics is a very different field, where there have been major advances. A book on history or philosophy written in the 19th century is still useful, but the linguistic works of that period are often of no more use than the ones on physics.

 

[Rakovsky]

No. The spelling stayed the same but the pronunciation changed. The "arm & hand" symbol originally represented /d/; when it changed to a guttural there was no reason to change the spelling. Think about modern languages: the Portuguese "rio" is pronounced "khiu" in Brazil, but they don't change the spelling, any more than we write "nite" for "knight".

OK.

It's more a question of when the palatal merged with a /t/. The two consonants are never confused by scribes in the New Kingdom, so the change took place after 1000 BC. In order for the word to be related to similar words in other languages there would have to have been a /t/ in prehistoric times, or the word in the other language would have to be a loan from late spoken Egyptian.

OK.
So in prehistoric times maybe Africans said NKL for God and NK For heaven and then based on what you're saying about T->K they started saying NTR and NT respectively?

It's possible. Sumerian is a complete mystery of a language which doesn't show any relations to any other. There might be a relation, or it might be sheer chance. The two "warning examples" they always quote are the English words "bad", which also exists in Persian, and "dog", which also exists in an Australian language. In fact both cases are coincidence: in the past, the words were pronounced differently.

Bad and Dog are two consonants though. A combination of four (T/D N G R) would be more impressive.

Yes, but on matters of culture and religion, which is his main interest. Linguistics is a very different field, where there have been major advances. A book on history or philosophy written in the 19th century is still useful, but the linguistic works of that period are often of no more use than the ones on physics.

Well in this case we are not talking just about Sayce's theory. Wikipedia listed several, and then I followed up with four besides Sayce's and I found more academic sources besides but ran out of energy quoting them.

A researcher on Mongolian religion, Kevin Turner, writes in Sky Shamans of Mongolia about the similarity in meanings:

• Tengerism originated in Sumeria, one of humanity's earliest civilizations, and probably derived fromt he early experiences of the shamans, prophets, and mystics of pre-Mesopotamian eras. The modern Mongolian term Tenger or Tengri meaning both sky realms and sky spirits almost certainly derives from the Sumerian word Dingir, also meaning both sky realms and deities. The concept of divnity in Sumerian was closely associated with the heavens, evident from the shared cuneiform sign for both heaven and sky and from the fact that its earliest form is a star shape. The name of every deity in Sumerian is prefixed by a star symbol. Mircea Eliade proposed that Tengrism may be the closest thing we have found to a reconstructed proto-Indo-European religion. It is also evident that Tengrism's three-layered worldview is nearly identical to the tripartite world found in many kinds of shamanism, as well as the Vedic triloka three realms world structure.

Chang-Hee Son writes in his book Haan of Minjung Theology and Han of Han Philosophy about Tangun, also known as Dangun Wanggeom, the founder of the first Korean kingdom in the mid-third millenium BC.:

• Kim argues with regard to Tangun, an important similarity between the Sumerian and the Korean language is found in the Mongolian word tengri. Tengri is conspicuously similar to the Sumerian word, Dingir. And so is the Korean word taengri. It is important to note here that daengri is the original name of Tangun. Tangun is the Sino-Korean transcription of the pure Korean word Daengri. In relation to the word an, in Sumerian language, Kramer also comments on the word dingir as follows, "the same sign is used to represent the word dingir, god."
• https://books.google.com/books?id=u7-SCzkMZgAC&pg=PA72&dq=tengri+dingir&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjh7e2uq7HOAhXKPCYKHSz1BBEQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=tengri dingir&f=false
  
  

In his book The Serpeant the Eagle the Lion and the Disk, Brannon Parker cites Dr. Haluk Berkman as follows under the heading "Sumerian Name of God Dingir is the Mongolian Tengri":

• "In the Sumerian pictographic writing system the sky was represented by a six pointed star and the sun by a circle with a dot at the center. When the Sumerians wanted to write dingir they drew the two symbols next to each other as shown below. Dingir was the sun god residing in the sky. This way of writing Dingir was logical because the Sumerian language was agglutinative and words could be created by adding suffixes. In fact, Dingir comes from the Central Asiatic Ting-ri or Temgri still existing as Tann in Turkish. Words similar to Tengri (meaning God) can still be found in many remote parts of the world. Examples are: Tengeri for the Central Asiatic Buryat Turks, Tingir for the Tartars of Crimea, Tanka for the North-American Indians, Tangaroa for the Pacific Islanders, Tian for the Chinese and Tin for the Etruscans. The ancient Egyptians adopted the solar disc standing for the suffix -ri as the name of the sun god and called it Ra as shown below."

See also Berkman's writing on this:
http://www.astroset.com/bireysel_gelisim/ancient/a22.htm

I don't know if Berkman is right that the Sumerians were using the O with their symbol Ж for Dingir. I know that the Chinese in their oracle bones and the Egyptians both used this O with a dot in the middle for their sign for the sun.

 

[Ahanit]

As I have learned it, is netjer a energy directly out of Nun and Naunet which is part of all what exists.. The divine Energy is part of all what exists, you find it whithin the Ka. the word netjer is used in ritualistik and magic ways to call not one God or goddess directly but to ask for the help, knowledge, wisdom of a greater group or of the god/godess within the higher self (Ka). It is not a special being like the Monotheistic God nor stands it for a special group of Gods/Godesses It is a pervasive divine energy from the beginning of existance, out of the all and nothing.

That is what i have learned from my Egyptologist friend

 

[Rakovsky]

I also notice:

Indo-European:
Dyeus - God/heavens
Dyeus Pater - Sky Father, the main god and king of gods
Indra - Thunder god of Mesopotamian Mittani and Hindus
Donar - High Germanic thunder god.
(Thunder - English word)
Natalis - Latin for birthing
Natura - Latin for Nature, derived from Natalis

Sumerian
Dingir - god/heavens
An - the main Sumerian father god (also I think means sky/heaven)

Turkic/Mongol
Tengri (god/heaven)

Chinese
Di (deity/emperor)
Tien/Tian (god/heaven/nature)

Egyptian
Nut - (sky/heavens/heavens goddess)
Neith/Nunet - goddesses of the unseen heavens and primordial waters in the heavens, respectively / primordial waters in the heavens
NTR= God and ???????????(anything else in its etymology?)

Cross-cultural roots

• Tan. Tin. An ancient root for fire, light, life, and God. Akkadian Tan, sun, Tin, life; Turkish tan light, Tin life, see Tengri: Chinese TIen "heaven"; Egyptian Tum "sun" [probably referring to the setting sun, Atum]
• SOURCE: Faiths of Man: Encyclopedia of Religions, Volume 3; James George Roche Forlong; University Books, 1964

Does anyone see a pattern that could point to a root for the word NTR or connotations for its meaning?

 

[Rakovsky]

I would like to share some quotes with you in sources that equate Tien with Tengri, David, since I've shown you some sources that equate Tengri with Dingir.

Religion in Primitive Cultures: A Study in Ethnophilosophy
By Wilhelm Dupré

• "Another name which stems probably from the Chinese Tien-li, Lord of Heaven, is tengri. The blue tengri is a God of fate the giver of life, the creator. His absolute power is reflected in the patria potestas of the patriarch, while his love is mirrored in the affection between father and son."

The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China
By John Man

• 
  
• "Heaven is the translation of the Mongol god Tengri who was also the god of several other Central Asian peoples for belief in Tengri went back centuries before hte Mongols arrived in Mongolia. Possibly the word derives from the same root as the Chinese for Heaven, tien, as in Tien Shan the Heavenly Mountaing [called Khan Tengri by Turkics]...."

ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese - Page 495
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0824829751
Axel Schuessler - 2007

• "Because the deity Tian came to prominence with the Zhou dynasty (a western state), a Central Asian origin has been suggested, note Mongolian tengri 'sky, heaven, heavenly deity' (Shaughnessy Sino-Platonic Papers, July 1989, and ...
• Most likely this word is connected with dian, (top) and its Tibetan-Burman cognates: West Tibetan (above, upper part), sten-lha, 'the upper gods, gods in heaven'"

What do you think about these theories?

 

[Rakovsky]

In case you are interested, I am uploading my word lists from AfroAsiatic languages here to look for the root meaning of NTR in Egypt's language family.