Mi?rayim
MI?RAYIM
MI?RAYIM (Heb. ?????????), Hebrew place-name. In the Septuagint it is rendered as Egypt. The Hebrew proper noun, however, has a broader range of meaning. As Aiguptos, the name of the country was derived from a name for the city of Memphis, ?et-kau-pta? ("Castle of the ka-souls of Ptah"), so the name of Mi?rayim may have been derived from the name of a city of Lower Egypt, if not of Lower Egypt itself. This is based on the occurrences in the Bible of Mi?rayim in combination with Pathros (pa to resy; "the southern country," i.e., Upper Egypt), in which cases Mi?rayim seems to mean Lower Egypt (To Mehy). Secondarily, it came to mean both all of Egypt and Egyptians, and was – and still is – the common Hebrew word for Egypt.
[Alan Richard Schulman]