Ancient EgyptianHistoricalPharaoh's name
Meaning: born of Thoth.
Thutmose
Thutmose belongs to the god of writing, which suits its bearers: one of them left the earliest battle account in history, and another left the most famous portrait.
| Origin | Ancient Egyptian — ḏḥwtj-ms, carried by four kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Thoth is born, or born of Thoth: Djehuty (Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, the moon and reckoning) + mes (to bear, to fashion) |
| Pronunciation | THOOT-mohs by convention; Egyptologists write Djehutymes and Greek writers gave Tuthmosis. Egyptian script recorded consonants and left the vowels out, so this respelling is a modern scholarly convention, not a recovered pronunciation. |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; not used as a given name in Egypt today |
| Variants | Tuthmosis, Thutmosis, Thothmes, Djehutymes |
| Nicknames | None; English speakers who use it tend to shorten to Thut or Tut, which invites confusion with another king |
| Non-royal bearer | Thutmose the sculptor, in whose Amarna workshop the bust of Nefertiti was found in 1912 |
History & meaning
The mes ending makes a whole family of Egyptian names, all of them sentences about a god bringing a child into the world: Ramses has Ra do the fashioning, Ahmose has the moon god Iah, and Thutmose has Thoth. Thoth is the one you would want. He invented writing, kept the records of the gods, measured time and adjudicated disputes, and Greeks later identified him with Hermes. As with every name in this group the vowels are not original — hieroglyphic writing left them out, so the reading THOOT-mohs is a scholarly agreement rather than a recovered sound, and the Greek Tuthmosis shows how differently the same consonants can be dressed.
Four kings carried it. Thutmose I was the first ruler buried in the Valley of the Kings, a decision that set the pattern for five hundred years. Thutmose III spent the first two decades of his reign as junior partner to his stepmother Hatshepsut, then conducted seventeen campaigns in the Levant, opening with the defeat of a Canaanite coalition at Megiddo in 1457 BC; the account carved into the walls at Karnak by his scribe Tjaneni is the earliest battle anywhere described in dated, circumstantial detail. Thutmose IV set a granite stele between the paws of the Sphinx recording a dream in which the buried statue promised him the throne if he cleared the sand. And the sculptor Thutmose, working at Amarna a generation later, produced the bust of Nefertiti that Ludwig Borchardt's team pulled out of his studio floor in 1912.
Not a name for a child in Egypt
Nobody in Egypt is named Thutmose. The god has no worshippers, the language is liturgical, and the ordinary boys' names of the country are Arabic and Coptic: Ahmed, Youssef, Tarek, Seif, and among Christian families Mina or Shenouda. Anyone using Thutmose outside Egypt is quoting a dynasty rather than continuing one.
Middle names for Thutmose
Two heavy syllables want something lighter behind them: Thutmose Alexander, Thutmose Gabriel, Thutmose Elias, Thutmose John. The middle names guide works through pairings for consonant-heavy first names.
Famous Thutmoses
Thutmose III, who died in 1425 BC, is the soldier — the reach of his campaigns earned him the nineteenth-century nickname the Napoleon of Egypt, and his annals at Karnak are among the most detailed royal records to survive from the ancient world. Thutmose IV left the Dream Stele. The sculptor Thutmose is the closest thing ancient Egypt has to a named artist with an attributable masterpiece.
Consider instead
Ramses is the same construction with a different god and far more public recognition. Amenhotep stays inside the Eighteenth Dynasty. Tarek is a real modern Egyptian name if that is what you are after.