Nyarlathotep: origin and meaning

Nyarlathotep: the enigmatic and much-debated entity created by H.P. Lovecraft. But what is the origin and meaning of his name?

"And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt.  Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh."

-- H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep”^[1]

Nyarlathotep

Nyarlathotep: the crawling chaos; the horror of infinite shapes.  Nyarlathotep assumes many different forms, but it seems that Lovecraft’s earliest, and most enduring, conception of the character is that of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.  While Nyarlathotep is strongly connected with Egypt, the name is not known in the Egyptian historical record.^[2]

Lovecraft was certainly interested in Egyptology, and in archaeology more generally. He visited the Egyptology collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1920s, and researched the subject when writing "Under the Pyramids".^[3] He is also known to have possessed books on the subject.^[4] However, there is no evidence that Lovecraft had any familiarity with the language.

Hotep is a genuine ancient Egyptian word, and it is commonly used as part of ancient Egyptian names. (The word hotep is sometimes still used to give an Egyptian ring to a name.)^[5] Whether Lovecraft encountered any of these names in his Egyptological reading is unknown. What is clear, though, is that Lovecraft had encountered names with Egyptian elements in the works of Lord Dunsany. Both Robert Price^[6] and S.T. Joshi^[7] have pointed out two similar names in the works of Lord Dunsany: Alhireth-Hotep in ‘Alhireth-Hotep the Prophet’^[8] and Mynarthitep in ‘The Sorrow of Search’.^[9]  Lovecraft had read these works, and was likely influenced by these names.^[10]

Overall, the evidence suggests that Nyarlathotep was inspired by Dunsany (or possibly by genuine ancient Egyptian names), rather than having been created using knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language. This hasn't stopped various scholars attempting to translate the name.  In that tradition, for a bit of fun, I'm going to attempt a translation of my own. I'm fully aware that any meaning I might extract from the name was unlikely to have been intended by Lovecraft, so reader beware!

Ancient Egyptian 101

The Egyptian language had its origins in the prehistoric Nile valley, and slowly evolved over the thousands of years that it was in use.  Several writing systems evolved along with it. I will use the hieroglyphic script for the rest of this article.^[11]

Translating ancient Egyptian is usually done as a two-step process.  Firstly, the hieroglyphs are transliterated i.e. converted into phonetic symbols showing the pronunciation.  Then the text is translated.  For example:

Hieroglyphs:  
Transliteration:  i̒w r ͑ m pt
Translation:  The sun is in the sky.

Egyptian names

Ancient Egyptian names are usually transliterated (using symbols to show the sound), then given their nearest equivalent using the English alphabet.  For example:

Hieroglyphs:  
Transliteration:  R’-ms-sw Mry-Jmn
Anglicised name:  Ramesses Meryamun

Ancient Egyptian didn't have any true vowel sounds, so it's common to see different Anglicised versions of an Egyptian name. In this case Ramses, Rameses and Ramesses are all commonly used.  The Jmn in Ramesses’ name could be Anglicised to Amon, Amun or Amen.

Even though ancient Egyptian names are usually shown phonetically, showing how they might have sounded, they do have a meaning that can be translated. So, for example, Ramesses Meryamun translates as ‘The (sun god) Ra has created him; beloved of (the god) Amun’.  This is an important consideration when trying to reverse engineer an Egyptian name from its Anglicised equivalent.

Anglicised Egyptian names

There are thousands of different signs in the hieroglyphic script; there are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  As a result, each English letter could potentially equate to one of many different hieroglyphs. For example, the word pronounced mer (transliterated as mr), could be any of the following:^[12]

    mr    adjective    Sick, ill, diseased.

    mr    noun    Pyramid.

    mr    noun    Canal, artificial lake.

    mr    noun    Milk jar.

    mr    verb    Bind.

This goes a long way towards explaining why there have been various, quite different, attempts to make sense of the name Nyarlathotep.

Back to the drawing board

I’m reasonably confident that Lovecraft intended the final element of Nyarlathotep to be the Egyptian word  ḥtp hotep, so I’m happy to take that as my starting point.  The root meaning of the word is the presentation of offerings to the gods, or to the spirits of the dead, in order to keep them satisfied and at peace.  The implication here is that the Egyptians were performing the relevant rites and sacrifices to keep Nyarlathotep placated -- or, at least, that they hoped he would be placated.

The question then becomes how to read the Nyarlat- at the start of the name, as well as how the name fits together as a whole.  Fortunately, Egyptian names often follow set patterns, and there is one type of name that would be plausible in this case:

<deity / king / individual> 
<deity / king / individual>-ḥtp
<deity / king / individual> is content

The Nyarlat- could be a name, most likely the name of some kind of supernatural entity, however I could not find an Egyptian name that would fit this reading.  A more likely explanation is that Nyarlat- is an epithet that describes an entity, rather than the name of that entity. That is the approach that I will explore next.

I checked a couple of ancient Egyptian dictionaries looking for words that might fit together to form Nyarlat, or something close to it. Straight away, though, that presents a problem: there was no L sound in the Egyptian language.  (I’ll return to this, and the subject of whether Nyarlathotep really is an Egyptian name, later.)  When the Egyptians had to write a foreign word that contained an L, they substituted an r or ru sound, so I chose to do the same. This threw up a few words that looked like they might be relevant.^[13]

For the Ny-, I found the following:

n(y) An adjective meaning 'he who belongs to'

  ni̒ A verb meaning ‘drive away, rebuff’, ‘avoid’, ‘throw down’, ‘turn back’, ‘get rid of’, ‘parry’ or possible ‘darken’

For the -arlat there were more options:

    3rr.t    ‘she who oppresses’ or ‘she who drives away’

    3ryt    ‘staff’

    'rrwt    ‘gate’ or ‘hall of judgement’

    i̒'rt    ‘cobra’

    i̒'rt    ‘abode’

    'rt    ‘papyrus roll’

Putting it all together

Having broken the name Nyarlathotep down into a variety of different parts, it’s time now to try to put the pieces back together and see if they make anything that constitutes a plausible whole.  Using the translations listed above gives the following twelve possibilities.

1. He who belongs to she who oppresses / drives away is content
2. He who drives away she who oppresses is content
3. He who belongs to the staff is content
4. He who drives away the staff is content
5. He who belongs to the gate is content
6. He who drives away the gate is content
7. He who belongs to the cobra is content
8. He who drives away the cobra is content
9. He who belongs to the abode is content
10. He who drives away the abode is content
11. He who belongs to the papyrus roll is content
12. He who drives away the papyrus roll is content

These are all grammatically correct Egyptian, but the question is whether any of them makes sense in a mythos context.

Options 1 and 2 refer to some female entity, "she who drives away" or "she who oppresses". Nyarlathotep might belong to her, or might be opposing her (by driving her away). Both of these options are very vague.

Options 3 and 4 refer to a staff, some sort of symbolic staff of office, which could be envisaged as having magical powers. I can’t immediately recall any Lovecraftian entity associated with such a staff, and this doesn’t strike me as plausible.

Options 5 and 6 refer to a gate, which is getting into more Lovecraftian territory. In “The Dunwich Horror”, Lovecraft wrote, ‘Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate.  Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate.’^[14]  So this reading of the name has the implication that Nyarlathotep belongs to, and presumably is in service to, Yog-Sothoth in his aspect as the keeper of the gateways between worlds or dimensions. Option 5 would suggest that Nyarlathotep belongs to Yog-Sothoth, which does not entirely fit with what Lovecraft reveals about his origin and role. While he is described as the 'soul and messenger of infinity's Other Gods',^[15] showing that he serves more than one master, he is perhaps most closely associated with Azathoth. Option 6 would suggest that Nyarlathotep fought with Yog-Sothoth, driving him away, which would seem to contradict the way he is depicted in Lovecraft's writings.

Options 7 and 8 refer to a 'cobra'. In this context, the word specifically refers to a supernatural snake deity that protects Egyptian royalty.  Option 7 does not work in this context: as a pharaoh, the cobra should belong to Nyarlathotep, not the other way around. Perhaps option 8 refers to Nyarlathotep as driving out the human king of Egypt, symbolised by the cobra, in order to take over his kingdom.

Options 9 and 10 refer to an 'abode', which begs the question of what this abode might be or what relevance it might have.  This translation is so vague that it does not strike me as particularly convincing.

Options 11 and 12 refer to a 'papyrus roll', which might be a reference to Nyarlathotep’s role as a messenger.  (In H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, Nyarlathotep is repeatedly described as the messenger of the Other Gods.)  It is possible that the Egyptians envisaged him carrying messages written on papyrus, a form of communication they were familiar with.  The phrasing here -- Nyarlathotep ‘belonging to’ the papyrus roll -- is strange, but that might just indicate that the Egyptians considered him not just the personification of the message, but the manifestation of that message.  Option 12 simply doesn’t seem to be relevant here.

Of the options listed above, numbers 5 and 11 are the most plausible (or the least implausible!):

n(y)-'rrwt-ḥtp
He who belongs to the gate is content

n(y)-'rt-ḥtp
He who belongs to the papyrus roll is content

A god from the east?

However, all of the interpretations above are based on the assumption that Nyarlathotep is a purely Egyptian name, something which is doubtful.  As pointed out earlier, the presence of the letter L in the name argues against this.  Perhaps there is a clue to this in “The Shadow Out of Time”, in which the narrator, while inhabiting a Yithian body, meets various other beings from different places and times.  He describes meeting ‘Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep’.^[16]

It’s interesting that Lovecraft places Khephnes in the 14th Dynasty, which is a poorly understood period devoid of any famous names such as a Ramesses or Tutankhamun.  It was a time when the kingdom of Egypt had fragmented, and the 14th Dynasty ruled only a part of the country, in the Nile Delta.  Intriguingly, many of the rulers of this dynasty had West Semitic names, and are thought to be of Canaanite origin.^[17]  Did the Canaanites know Nyarlathotep’s true origin, and how he had come to take human form?  Is it possible that the name Nyarlathotep, or at least the initial Nyarlat-, was Canaanite rather than Egyptian?

There is a well-attested type of Egyptian name that takes the form <deity>-ḥtp, meaning ‘<deity> is content’.^[18]  It’s possible that the name Nyarlathotep should be read in the same way, i.e. ‘the god Nyarlat is content’.  In this case, Nyarlat would be some deity previously unknown to the Egyptians, with a foreign name, whom Nyarlathotep serves or pacifies.  Perhaps ‘Nyarlat’ is another name for an entity from the Cthulhu mythos that we know under a different guise.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning a side issue concerning Nyarlathotep’s chronology.  In the prose poem “Nyarlathotep”, the character himself claims that ‘he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries’.^[19]  Joshi counted back 2,700 years from Lovecraft’s time, saying that this placed Nyarlathotep in the 22nd Dynasty (940-730 BCE).^[20]  This is true, but Joshi doesn’t connect this to the other chronological fact here: that Nyarlathotep was already known in the 14th Dynasty, which dates to around 1805-1710 BCE.  It makes me wonder whether Nyarlathotep was active in Egypt between those times, a period of around a thousand years.

You say potato…

Whatever, the precise reading of Nyarlathotep, I am convinced that the final element of the name is the Egyptian word ḥtp, or hotep.  This affects the way the word is pronounced.  It could have been written -- as Lord Dunsany did with his character Alhireth-Hotep -- as the hyphenated word Nyarlat-hotep.  The H of hotep should not be merged with the preceding T to give a sound like the th in ‘the’.  Instead, the name should be pronounced something like nee-arlat-hotep, the -hotep part starting with a strong H sound.

Appendix: The published translations

I’m going to finish by discussing other people’s translations of Nyarlathotep, and laying out the details of why I consider them to be flawed.  The translations that I will discuss are all from published sources.  I have come across various other translations on the internet,^[21] however, these may be works in progress, and I would not want to quote something that the author has not had chance to revise.

One general rule applies to all of these translations, whether published or not: it should not simply consist of a string of words plucked out of the dictionary.  To be convincing, it must either form a grammatically coherent whole, or conform to a known type of Egyptian name.  For example, I have seen several people read the N- at the start of Nyarlathotep as the word  n, the negative 'not'.  This is true, as far as it goes, but the word  n is only used in certain types of grammatical construction.  Other types of negative sentences use different negative words, such as  nn or  i̒wty, or require the addition of the auxiliary verb  wnn.  It is not correct to simply add  n to the start of any sentence to make it negative.

The annotated Nyarlathotep

David Haden has suggested that Nyarlathotep means something like ‘letter/message that is trusted of the gods’.^[22]  He arrived at this by splitting the name into the following components:

• Nyar -- Hebrew for letter (paper), extended to include the sense of Nyarlathotep as a messenger of the gods, the blank page on which they wrote.
• Lath -- ancient Hebrew with a possible meaning of ‘trust’.
• Hotep -- ancient Egyptian word meaning ‘united with the gods’.  (Translation taken from H.K. Brugsch,  A History of Egypt under the Pharaohs, 1881.)

I don’t like this reading for several reasons.  Firstly, I don’t like the translation of ‘hotep’ as ‘united with the gods’.  Brugsch may have given this translation -- I couldn’t find this in his book, and Haden doesn’t cite a page number -- but, even so, Brugsch is somewhat outdated.  I couldn’t find the meaning ‘united’ in the standard ancient Egyptian dictionaries currently in use.^[23]

Secondly, I don’t agree that lath means ‘trust’.  Haden cites the name Tiglath-Pileser, which translates as ‘my trusted one (is) the heir of Esharra’.  Haden pulled out the lath part of this name, and assigned to it the meaning ‘trust’.  However, the source that Haden cites for this translation, namely an article by John Huehnergard on the roots of various Semitic words,^[24] does not back up Haden’s reading of the word.  According to Huehnergard, the whole word tiglath means 'my trusted one'.^[25] The -lath cannot be separated from the initial tig- without the word completely losing its meaning.

Even if lath and hotep had been accurately translated, I still wouldn’t favour Haden’s interpretation of Nyarlathotep.  It is a mish-mash of words from different languages in different eras, and to my mind just doesn’t hang together.

Egypthos

Sean Branney, of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, also had a crack at translating Nyarlathotep in an article titled ‘Egypthos’.^[26]  I have an enormous amount of respect for the people at the HPLHS, and normally I would defer to their superior knowledge and research.  In this case, though, I don’t agree with Mr. Branney’s translation:

The closest translation I could make is as follows: NYW•R•3R•HTP (which would be pronounced in the Egyptian as: nyoo-er-at-hotep). Interestingly, this translates roughly to: “That which doesn’t exist (nyoo) since (er) the moment (at) of freedom/sacrifice (hotep).”

I really wish that this translation had been accompanied by the hieroglyphs, rather than just the transliteration, for extra clarity, so what follows is my attempt to break things down.

NYW: I just can’t think of a word with a transliteration of nyw, or a pronunciation of nyoo, that means ‘that which doesn’t exist’.  There is a negative word  n, but this would have been pronounced like ‘en’ rather than ‘nyoo’, and it is not the stand-alone nominal form ‘that which is not’.  The nominal phrase ‘that which doesn’t exist’ is  i̒wtt , pronounced like ‘yoo-tet’.

R: There is a preposition  r.  However, it usually translates as ‘to’, ‘for’, or ‘until’ indicating movement towards something or into the future.  (The preposition  d̠r would more usually be used for ‘since’.)  In itself, the use of  r would not be a stumbling-block to Mr. Branney’s reading of the name, but it would change the putative translation to ‘That which doesn’t exist until the moment of freedom/sacrifice’.

3R: This looks like a typo for 3T and, apart from that, there are no issues with this one.  It is the word  3t 'moment, instant'.  This would have been pronounced like ‘art’, with a long a sound.

HTP: This is the Egyptian word  ḥtp.  I’m not sure that the meaning ‘freedom’ is a valid translation, but ‘sacrifice’ is plausible.  The root concept behind the word is that of making offerings (to a god or to the dead), and such offerings included the sacrifice of various animals.

Once again, what we have here is a good attempt -- which shows some research into the original Egyptian -- but there is still one insurmountable flaw in Mr. Branney’s interpretation.

Call of Cthulhu RPG

The meaning of Nyarlathotep was discussed in the fifth edition of the rule book for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.  The book provided a hand-copy of the following hieroglyphs:

The author, William Hamblin, explained that the name 'is a contraction of ny har rut hotep, meaning "there is no peace (safety, rest) at the gate".’^[27]

So how does this translation stand up?  Hotep is the one word on which I, and all the other translators, seem to agree.  All of the other elements of the name presented here are more or less plausible when taken individually.

• As previously discussed, there is a negative word  n, the negative 'not'.
• There is a preposition  ḥr, ‘at’.
• There is a word  (and variant spellings) rwt, meaning ‘gate’.  (Hamblin's explanation of the name is that 'Nyarlathotep, in his role as messenger of the Outer Gods, is the "gateway" between the planes, and specifically between their dimensions and ours'.)

However, the grammar in Hamblin’s translation is wrong.  The word  n, by itself, is not the correct way to negate this sort of sentence.  Additionally, the word order needs to be changed, so that the adverbial phrase (‘at the gate’) comes at the end.  To say ‘there is no peace at the gate’, there are three possible constructions that could be used.^[28]

nn wn ḥtp ḥr rwt
(pronounced something like ‘nen wen ho-tep her root’)

nn ḥtp ḥr rwt
(pronounced something like ‘nen ho-tep her root’)

n wnt ḥtp ḥr rwt
(pronounced something like ‘en wenet ho-tep her root’)

None of these pronunciations bears much of a resemblance to Nyarlathotep.

---

1  H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft, New York: Del Rey 1995, p. 52.↩
2  It is not listed in H. Ranke, Die Agyptischen Personennamen, 3 vols., Gluckstadt 1935, 1955 and 1977.↩
3  S.T. Joshi and D.E.Schultz, An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, New York: Hippocampus Press 2004, p.282.↩
4  Lovecraft is known to have owned at least 4 books on Egyptology. See S.T. Joshi, Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue, New York: Hippocampus Press 2012, p. 36, 107, 129 and 133.↩
5  The 2002 film Bubba Ho-Tep is one example.↩
6  R.M. Price, The Nyarlathotep Cycle, Chaosium 1997, p. vii.↩
7  S.T. Joshi and D.E.Schultz, An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, New York: Hippocampus Press 2004, p.191.↩
8  Published in 1905 in The Gods of Pegana.↩
9  Published in 1906 in Time and the Gods.↩
10  In addition, David Haden mentioned the novel Hotep: A Dream of the Nile by William Wilshire Myers, which was published in 1905 -- although he does not cite any evidence to show that Lovecraft was aware of that work.  (D. Haden, Walking with Cthulhu: H. P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer, New York City, 1924-26, Burslem Books 2011.)↩
11  All the hieroglyphs used here were created using the JSesh software, available at https://jsesh.qenherkhopeshef.org.↩
12  All translations were taken from R.O. Faulkner, A concise dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Oxford: Griffith Institute 1991, pp. 110-1.↩
13  All translations were again taken from R.O. Faulkner, A concise dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Oxford: Griffith Institute 1991.↩
14  H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”, H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus, Vol. 3, London: Voyager 2000, p. 117.↩
15  H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus, Vol. 1, London: Grafton 1985, p. 382.↩
16  H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus, Vol. 3, London: Grafton 1985, p. 498.↩
17  K.S.B. Ryholt, The Political Situation in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period c. 1800-1550 B.C., Copenhagen 1997, pp. 251-5.↩
18  For example, there were four kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty named Jmn-ḥtp, Amenhotep, meaning ‘(the god) Amun is content’.  Non-royal people could also use the same form of name, such as d̠ḥwty-ḥtp (Djehutyhotep), meaning ‘(the god) Thoth is content’.  (H. Ranke, Die Agyptischen Personennamen, Vol.1, Gluckstadt 1935, p.408.)↩
19  H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft, New York: Del Rey 1995, p. 52.↩
20  S.T. Joshi and D.E.Schultz,  An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, New York: Hippocampus Press 2004, p.191.↩
21  Lie Ju, “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”, http://lieju.deviantart.com/art/The-Dream-Quest-of-Unknown-Kadath-399756474 [accessed 26 November 2016].  Also, a discussion on the Yog-Sothoth.com website’s forum.↩
22  D. Haden, Walking with Cthulhu: H. P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer, New York City, 1924-26, Burslem Books 2011.  (Haden’s discussion of the name Nyarlathotep was part of his annotations to Lovecraft’s story “Nyarlathotep”.  An online version can be found at http://www.jurn.org/nyarlathotep-annotated.pdf.  Haden’s interpretation of the name was cited in L. Klinger, The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, New York: Liveright 2014, p. 30.↩
23  Faulkner’s Middle Egyptian dictionary (R.O. Faulkner, A concise dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Oxford: Griffith Institute 1991) and the Beinlich Wordlist (currently hosted online by the Fitzwilliam Museum at http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/er/beinlich/beinlich.html).↩
24  J. Huehnergard, “2011 Proto-Semitic Language & Culture; Appendix II Semitic Roots”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011, p. 2078.  An online version can be found at https://www.academia.edu/1421136/2011_Proto-Semitic_Language_and_Culture_Semitic_Roots.↩
25  I double-checked against an online Assyrian dictionary, which confirmed that the entire word tukulti means ‘my trust’.  (The root is tukultu, the noun ‘trust’, and tukulti is the possessive ‘my trust’.)  Source: http://www.assyrianlanguages.org/akkadian/dosearch.php?searchkey=1385&language=id.↩
26  S. Branney, “Egypthos”, in Strange Eons, vol. 2, issue 10.  A copy of this article was available online at the Historical Society’s website until recently; hopefully its absence is only temporary.↩
27  W. Hamblin, “In Rerum Supernatura”, in S. Petersen and L. Willis, Call of Cthulhu, edition 5.6, Chaosium Inc. 1999, p. 111.↩
28  A.H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, third edition, Oxford: Griffith Institute 1988, p.83.↩