Bibliotheca Polyglotta

Ultimately from Eg pr ʕ3 [per-ʕō ?] ‘pharaoh’ (lit. ‘big house,’ i.e., the royal palace), probably via Syr perʕūn (which would explain the final ‑n). The ‑n in Syr is probably from Lat or Grk.

hist

▪ eC7 Q 10:79 wa-qāla firʕawnu ’ʔtū-nī bi-kulli sāḥirin ʕalīmin ‘and Pharaoh said: Bring me every learned sorcerer’

cogn

…

disc

▪ Youssef2003: from Eg pr ʕ3 ‘pharaoh’
▪ Rolland2014: from Eg per-o, via Syr. [PayneSmith1903: perʕūn ]
▪ Jeffery1938: »The Commentators tell us that firʕawn was the title of the kings of the Amalekites,¹ just as Chosroes and Caesar were titles of the kings of Persia and Roum (Ṭab. and Bayḍ. on ii, 46). It was thus recognized as a foreign word taken over into Ar (Sībawaih in Siddiqi, Studien, 20, and al-Jawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 112). / Hirschfeld, New Researches, 13, thinks that it came to Ar from Hbr, the form being due to a misreading of PRʕH as PRʕWN but there is no need to descend to such subtleties when we note that the Christian forms give us the final n. In Grk it is pharaôn, in Syr perʕūn, and in Eth [Gz] firʕon. The probabilities are that it was borrowed from Syr (Mingana, Syriac Influence, 81; Sprenger, Leben, i, 66; Horovitz, JPN, 169). / There does not seem to be any well authenticated example of the word in pre-Islamic times, for the oft quoted examples from Zuhair and Umayya are spurious.² Sprenger has noticed the curious fact that the name does not occur in the Sūra of Joseph where we should naturally expect it, which may indicate that the name was not known to Muḥammad at the time that story was composed, or may be was not used in the sources from which he got the material for the story.«

1. As Nöldeke showed in his essay Über die Amalekiter, Göttingen, 1864, this name is used by Ar writers in a very loose way to cover all sorts of peoples of the Near East of whose racial affinities they had no exact knowledge. The term is used indifferently for Philistines, Canaanites, and Egyptians, and Bagh. in his note on ii, 46, tells us that Pharaoh was the ruler of the Amalekite Copts! 2. Horovitz, KU 130, however, would defend the genuineness of one passage in Umayya.

west

▪ Not from Ar firʕawn but, ultimately, from the same Eg etymon, is Engl pharaoh : < oEngl pharon, from Lat pharaon-is [gen.; nom. pharao ], from Grk pharaṓ, from Hbr parʕōh, from Eg per-ʕo – EtymOnline

deriv

► firʕawnī, adj., Pharaonic; al-firʕawniyyūn, n.pl., the ‘Pharaonians’, a nickname for the ‘Egypt first’ school of thought of the twenties and early thirties

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