User talk:Aritmaat

Aritmaat, you are invited to the Teahouse!

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Names of gods

I realize the reasons some editors prefer those names, but in most circumstances I disagree with them. My reasoning is partly based on the Wikipedia policy known as WP:COMMONNAME, which says that article titles should reflect the most common name found in English-language reliable sources. Alternative names and the original native word can be mentioned briefly in the article, but they cannot replace the most common term. Granted, that policy applies to article titles, not article text, but in most cases I think it's unwise for the text of one article to conflict with the title of another, even if the link compensates to some degree for the potential confusion.

The common name policy is also relevant for my second point. If there's a clear change in which term English-speakers commonly use, then the article title can change too. That's more likely to happen when a living culture pushes for a name to change (as when the Inuit pushed against the term "Eskimo", which they saw as pejorative, in favor of their own name for themselves). Ancient Egyptian culture has not existed as a living whole for 1500 years, so there isn't likely to be a major shift in English usage. Some Egyptologists may prefer terms that more closely resemble Egyptian words; for example, Stephen Quirke speaks of Iunu and Mennefer instead of Heliopolis and Memphis. But other words are simply too firmly entrenched in English usage to change: Quirke still uses "Thebes", "Osiris", "Horus", "Isis", and "Hathor". It's mainly because these major deities names are so well established that I object to changing them. I don't have a problem with a bias in favor of more-Egyptian names for minor gods (e.g., the name "Onuris" is probably more widely used in reliable sources than "Anhur", but our article uses the latter name).

Then there is the problem with multiple reconstructions of the gods' names. Names like Asar, Aset, and Heru are widely used by non-scholars trying to restore the original names, but they aren't necessarily most faithful to the original Egyptian words, whose exact pronunciations are unknown in any case. My impression from the scholarly sources is that Osiris' original name was more like Usir or Woser than Asar, and many reconstructions are possible; see Osiris#Etymology of the name. If we abandon the overwhelmingly common English terms for these deities, which reconstruction should we choose instead?

Finally I want to address your concern about Egyptian concepts being viewed through a culturally Western lens. Scholars of Egyptian religion often worry about that and work very hard to compensate. I did my best to do the same in writing the article ancient Egyptian deities. Because they don't want to misrepresent Egyptian culture, Egyptologists generally don't translate words like maat, ba, and ka, whose meanings are too complex and too different from English terms to be reasonably well translated by one Egyptian word. Yet I've never seen them object to the well-established divine names. The Egyptians did, of course, ascribe a mystical significance to names. But as far as Wikipedia is concerned, it's more important for readers to understand what the Egyptians believed about the gods and how they worshipped them than to use reconstructions of their original names. A. Parrot (talk) 22:14, 19 September 2014 (UTC)