The ren: the power of the name in ancient Egypt

For the ancient Egyptians the name, called ren, was not an external label but a constituent part of the person, alongside the body, the ka, the ba, the shadow and the heart. As long as the name was spoken and written, the person in some way continued to exist; erasing it meant inflicting a second death, more final than the first. From this conception derive many religious, funerary and magical practices documented across almost three millennia of Egyptian history.

The name that gives life

Funerary inscriptions often invite passers-by to say the name of the deceased and to recite the offering formula, thereby ensuring for him bread, beer and every good and pure thing. Survival depended on the memory of the living and on the durability of writing: this is why names were carved in stone and repeated on statues, coffins, stelae and grave goods, as if to multiply the safeguards against oblivion.

The king's name was enclosed in an oval that we now call a cartouche, in Egyptian shenu, which represented a knotted rope and alluded to the idea of encircling, that is, of ruling everything the sun encircles in its course. The royal titulary comprised five names, each with a precise political and religious meaning, assumed on accession to the throne and meant to define the programme of the reign.

Erasing the name

Precisely because the name was so important, its destruction was a form of condemnation. After the death of Queen Hatshepsut, under the reign of Thutmose III, many of her images and cartouches were chiselled off monuments. After the Amarna period the memory of Akhenaten was attacked, and his name disappeared from later king lists. During Akhenaten's own reign, for that matter, it was the name of the god Amun that had been hacked out on temples and monuments.

A ritual form of the same logic are the execration texts: names of foreign enemies and Egyptian rebels written on jars or clay figurines, which were then broken or buried. Important series dating from the Middle Kingdom have been found, valuable to historians as well because they preserve names of places and princes of Nubia, Libya and the Syro-Palestinian region.

Isis and the secret name of Ra

The most eloquent myth about the power of the name is preserved in a papyrus of the Ramesside period now in the Egyptian Museum of Turin. The story relates that the goddess Isis, wishing to learn the secret name of the sun god Ra, now grown old, fashioned a snake from the god's spittle mixed with earth and placed it on his path. Bitten and tormented by the venom, Ra listed many of his names, but only when he revealed the hidden one did Isis free him from pain.

The myth explains why Egyptian magic insisted so much on names: knowing the true name of a god, a demon or an illness was considered the key to acting upon it. In the Book of the Dead the deceased must declare the names of the gates of the afterlife and of their guardians in order to pass, demonstrating a knowledge that opens the way.

The ren shows how deeply Egyptian culture interwove writing and existence. Hieroglyphic script was not merely a means of communication but a form of presence: writing a name made it endure, erasing it annihilated it. It is an idea we find, in different forms, in many later traditions that have attributed to names a power over the world.