On the Names of Sesostris, Vesozes, and Vezosis

​Last week, I wrote a bit about the origins of the name of the first pharaoh in medieval Arabic traditions, Naqrāūs. Well, that led me to the first pharaoh in the Greek tradition, which is a bit of a confusing mess. Herodotus, of course, famously named the first (human) king of Egypt as Menes, but in later Greek traditions, from roughly the fourth century BCE onward, the story changed and Sesostris took that position, establishing a kingship in Egypt after the first king in history, Ninus, did the same in Assyria. Sesostris, in the Greek tradition, was a world-conquering hero whose dominion stretched from Europe to Scythia and whose power was unrivaled. 

I ended up here in a rather roundabout way, through the fifth-century work of Orosius, a Christian historian whose Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, which survives in the original, was also quoted by the Arabic-language historian al-Maqrizi around 1400 CE. When al-Maqrizi quoted Book 1, chapter 14, he gave the name of the ancient king as Berūbah. When I went back to Orosius’ original, I discovered the name given as “Vesozes.”
 
I have no idea how the Arabic translator whose work al-Maqrizi copied (he states explicitly that he is using a translation) got from Vesozes to Berūbah. But I did discover that Orosius apparently got his name from Justin, whose Epitome of the work of Pompeius Trogus gives the same figure’s name as Vezosis. This, everyone agrees, is supposed to be Sesostris.
 
All of the references in the literature suggest that there is some body of common knowledge of how this mangling of names happened, but no one will say what it is. The closest any source came was to give page numbers to a French-language article by Gaston Maspero from 1901 in which he reviews a German-language book, Sesostris, by Kurt Sethe, which apparently attempted trace the etymology of various forms of the king’s name. I don’t have access to the book, so a translation of Maspero’s summary will need to suffice:

In 1867, [Georg] Unger adopted the thesis of these scholars, and he attempted to prove its accuracy by carefully comparing all Greco-Roman texts with all known Egyptian documents at the time. He observed that classical tradition traced its hero further back than the Ramesside line. He came to believe that Osirtasen III was the successor whom this tradition attributed to its Sesostris—Sesostris, Marachos, Narachos, Nakkaros, Nencoreus. He showed that most of the features of the legend were also visible in the kings of the Twelfth and Twenty-Eighth Dynasties, and he concluded that Sesostris really belonged to the Twelfth Dynasty, just as Manetho had asserted: he was Osirtasen or, as pronounced according to Lauth, Vesourtesen III. Sesostris would have been a popular corruption of Vesourtesen, but by derivation of the second part Sen from the official form; the first part responding, as Eratosthenes had it, to an Egyptian term meaning "powerful, vigorous": Ses-Sis, perhaps an abbreviation of the name of the god Khonsu, Schonsou, Epupis or Psamphis. Unger henceforth had no doubt that Manetho had indeed meant a Sesostris from the XIIth Dynasty; most Egyptologists continued nonetheless to believe that the hero of Herodotus had been modeled primarily, if not uniquely, on Ramses II of the monuments.
 
Mr. Sethe has just revisited the question and added a new point. The most important fact, he says, is that all readings of the name transcribed until now as Osirtasen, Osortesen, Vesourtesen—all consist first of the name of a goddess, Ousret–Ousret, later followed by the feminine termination –t, Ousreté, the powerful one; and second, an element SEN, possibly from the root snj, to resemble, to be equal to…, which appears in many theophoric names under the first Theban empire: Sn-t-Imn, the one who is equal to Amon, Sn-t-Bȝ, the one who is equal to the Ram of Mendes, Sn-t-Mȝᶜ.t, the one who is equal to the goddess Maat.
 
The name of the goddess, written at the beginning of the word, does not take second place in pronunciation, due to the principle of honor usually applied in such cases: hence one wrote Ousresen but said Sen-Ousret, then Sen-wosret, she who is equal to the goddess Wosre. Σεσωστρις is therefore not much further from Sen-wosre than most good transcriptions of Egyptian names are from their original Egyptian forms. “S” for the auxiliary vowel in the middle of words, long “e” for the short “o” in an open syllable, “e” for “a” in the feminine ending –at, the final “ou” in Greek instead of Egyptian “w” are all fully regular. Elsewhere we find the Greek combination σε for an Egyptian or Semitic “w”: especially when it is placed at the beginning, as in this case, which is nothing but natural. … There is no real difference between Senwosret and Sesostris than that of the second part, corresponding to w and t in Egyptian.
 
Mr. Sethe supposes that the name fell into the hands of those who themselves misunderstood it and transformed it—as did Ausone, in the form Sesostris; to avoid the hiatus resulting from the fall of an n in Se(n)ostris–Sostris, an extra s was inserted between o and t, and one arrived at Sesostris, Sesostris, and then Sésostris, Sésostris. The versions without t or n, Sésosis–Sésosis, derived from a misunderstood Egyptian model where the root wsr, strong, powerful, would have been kept and perhaps even reinforced; as is often the case in other names: Senwosre–Senwosre would have gradually changed into Sewose, then into Sesose, Sésostris and Sésostros.
 
Since the first century, the name Sesostris has most often been attached to the heroes named Sesosis, Sesostris, Sesonchosis, Sesou, and Sesetsourai, all supposedly drawn from the Ramesside name (like Rameses I, II, or III). Mr. Sethe rejects this etymology and substitutes the one he just explained. This is the core of his study. When it comes to laying out the dates, wars, reforms, all the historical material attributed to Sesostris by classical authors, the facts better match what we know of the Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty and especially of Osirtasen I than the “history of Ramses,” which is supported only by indirect testimonies collected by Bunsen and, more recently, by Wiedemann. If we add to that what we owe to Sethe’s analysis, it is all the hypotheses that attributed to Ramses II the portions of the Sesostris legend that Unger thought he could attribute to another.

​This, apparently, is the underlying scholarly analysis that is now conventional wisdom about the origins of the name Sesostris.
 
That didn’t really help, unless the argument is that Trogus ignored Greek tradition and rendered the name from a transliteration of a partly understood hieroglyphic original, Vesourtesen. That’s possible, but probably not the answer, not least because Trogus’ sources were Greek, not Egyptian.
 
In checking into Justin’s Epitome, it seems that there are two hundred ancient and medieval copies of it, and “Vezosis” is only one variant. According to an 1898 article by the German scholar Fritz Hommel, the same name is given as “Vexoris,” “Uesosis,” and “Sesosis” in other manuscripts. It might have saved me quite a bit of time if anyone had just said that it was most likely a gradual scribal corruption by copyists who didn’t realize he was talking about Sesostris rather than scholars being super coy about it and giving long lists of references that refer to one another and ultimately go nowhere.