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A hunting dog (tesem) named Akbaru is depicted in the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu (died c. 2566 BC).
There is a stone relief dated to circa 2400 BC from the Fifth Dynasty showing a dog called Beha, probably a greyhound. The name Beha is
Beha was also the name of one of the dogs of the Eleventh Dynasty pharaoh Intef II (c. 2112–2063 BC); the dogs name was carved on an individual stele.
In the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2345–2181 BC), a guard dog named Abuwtiyuw was buried with his own stele, sometime before 2280 BC (unfortunately, it cannot be more precisely dated as the stele was reused in another construction so its original location is unknown). The (translated) inscription on it reads:
Source: George A. Reisner, The Dog Which Was Honored by the King of Upper and Lower Egypt. In Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts Vol. 34, No. 206 (Dec., 1936)
Inscription of the Dog Abuwtiyuw. Source: Archaeologist Ticia Verveer
As to the meaning of the name,
According to Reisner, Abuwtiyuws breed was the “greyhound or slugi (called tsm in Egyptian).” Other dog names also survive from Ancient Egypt, though online sources do not give dates for the following:
In Ancient Egypt, dogs commonly bore the same names as humans, while some had theophoric names (names which included the name of a god). Dogs,
Source: Reisner
In Ancient Greece, dog naming was common. The Greek writer Xenophon, in Cynegeticus (On Hunting, late 5th / early 4th century BC) gives a list of dog names he thought suitable:
The meanings of some of these names are explained in a footnote:
Given that dogs were domesticated many thousands of years before even the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt, it is quite likely that dogs were being given names before any of the ones mentioned above. However, there do not appear to be any older known names for non-mythical dogs than those from Ancient Egypt.
In mythology, NKCampbell mentioned Panhu in a comment; Panhu was supposedly the dog of the Emperor Ku (possibly reigned c. 2436 BC to c. 2366 BC though some classify Ku as semi-historical). In legend, Panhu killed an enemy general and married Kus daughter. Another mythical dog is Sharvara (meaning variegated or spotted) from Hinduism (mentioned in the Vedas) and belonging to Yama, the lord of death and of justice. This mythical dog was one of two which “guarded the gates of the netherworld.”
(All emphasis is mine)
Somebody has compiled info about Roman dogs, mostly literary (Ovid) but also a few real ones, although sources for real dogs may be questionable.
The oldest one appears to be this: Perseus. m. The name of the dog of Aemilia Tertia, daughter of the 2nd century BC Roman consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus.
Long before well known Cerberus from Greek mythology the Mesopotamian goddess Bau, later named Gula, is depicted with a dogs head:
This dates from around 3300 B.C. when depictions of collared dogs appear in art.
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Some completely uncreative owner has decided the family pet will be known as Dog. Or, perhaps, a similarly uncreative author names their feline character Kitty. Alternately, the creature in question does have a less Shaped Like Itself name, but for whatever reason, Alice the Pig prefers to go as Piggy. Usually but not always applied to animals; robots imaginatively named Robot and the like are part of this trope, too. Remarkably common in childrens shows, despite the obvious problems it should theoretically cause.
She almost wins that one by default because my story is that my parents found “Karen” in a book of baby names and liked it. Riveting, isn’t it? Karen does indeed have a much better tale. Her stepfather went to the greyhound racing track and a speedy dog named “Wild Karen” won, and that’s who she was named after. She told me that as a child, she hardly ever shared that story because being named after a dog would have invited a lot of teasing from other kids.
Lots of dogs share names with humans these days, and some of the really common names such as Emma, Zoe, Sadie, and Sophie are popular for both species, but it’s hard to know who’s named after whom anymore, or whether parents and guardians simply liked the name. Do you know of any people who were named after dogs?Tags:
I understood completely, but oh, how times have changed! Now, it sounds pretty cool that she was named after a dog. (Of course, going to the greyhound racetrack is not viewed as positively as it once was, but that’s another issue.) Because Karen had expressed concern about sharing this story, I made sure to ask her if I could write about it for The Bark’s blog, and she agreed. It turns out that she just received The Bark for Christmas and loves it!
Karen B. London, Ph.D. is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and Certified Professional Dog Trainer who specializes in working with dogs with serious behavioral issues, including aggression. Karen writes the animal column for the Arizona Daily Sun and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of six books about canine training and behavior, including her most recent, Treat Everyone Like a Dog: How a Dog Trainer’s World View Can Improve Your Life
I recently met another woman named Karen, and our conversation turned to dogs. Of course, there’s a tendency for many of my conversations to take that route, but this one arrived at the subject quite directly. The other Karen told me that she bet the story of how she got her name was more interesting than the story of how I got mine.
We Named the Dog Indiana
Long, long ago—five years, to be precise—Jeff Owens accepted that his calls to the vet would tax his fortitude. When the person on the other end asks his name, Owens, a test scorer in Albuquerque, says, “Jeff.” When they ask for his cat’s name, he has to tell them, “Baby Jeff.” The black exotic shorthair, a wheezy female with a squashed face and soulful orange eyes, is named for Owens, says his partner, Brittany Means, whose tweet about Jeff and Baby Jeff went viral this past spring. The whole thing started as a joke several years ago, when Means started calling every newcomer to their home—the car, the couch—“Baby Jeff.” Faced with blank adoption paperwork in 2017, the couple realized that only one name would do.
Baby Jeff is a weird (albeit very good!) name, but it’s not as weird as it would have been a century or two ago. In the U.S., and much of the rest of the Western world, we’re officially living in an era of bequeathing unto our pets some rather human names. It’s one of the most prominent reminders that these animals have become “members of the family,” says Shelly Volsche, an anthropologist at Boise State University, to the point where they’re ascribed “agency and personhood.” The animals in our homes commonly receive so many of the acts of love people shower on the tiny humans under their care; pets share our beds, our diets, our clothes. So why not our names, too?
The names and nature of the human-animal bond weren’t always this way. Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a medieval historian at the Science Museum Group and the author of Medieval Pets, has found records from the Middle Ages describing dogs with names that alluded to some part of their physical appearance (Sturdy or Whitefoot), or an object that appealed to their human (a 16th-century Swiss wagoner once owned a dog named Speichli, or “Little Spoke”). Details on cats are sparser, Walker-Meikle told me, but some Old Irish legal texts make mention of a few felines, among them Cruibne (“little paws”) and Bréone (“little flame”).
Even when people-ish names did appear during this era, and the few centuries following, they trended zany, cheeky, cutesy, even pop-cultural—nothing that would be easily mistaken for a child’s given name. The 18th-century English painter William Hogarth named his pug Trump—perhaps an anglicization of a Dutch admiral called Tromp, according to Stephanie Howard-Smith, a pet historian at King’s College London. Catherine Parr, the last of King Henry VIII’s six wives, had a dog called Gardiner, after the anti-Protestant Bishop of Winchester. “This was her enemy, who wanted to destroy her,” Walker-Meikle told me. The idea was “to take the piss out of” him.
Then, as the Victorian era ushered in the rise of official dog breeds, people began to reconceptualize the roles that canines could play in their homes. Once largely relegated to working roles, dogs more often became status symbols, and items of luxury—and as their status grew, so did the list of names they could acceptably bear. People no longer considered it such “a slight, necessarily, to share your name with a dog,” Howard-Smith told me. Diminutive names for animals—Jack or Fanny rather than John or Frances—became more common, too, paving the path for even more overlap down the line.
The big boom happened in the 20th century, and by its latter half, lists of the most popular dog and baby names were getting awfully hard to tell apart. Nowadays, you could probably “go to a playground and shout ‘Alice!,’ and perhaps both dogs and girls would come rushing to you,” says Katharina Leibring, an expert in language and dialect at Uppsala University, in Sweden. Cats, meanwhile, seem to “have been kind of behind the curve in getting human names,” or perhaps receiving any names at all, Volsche told me. Even in 19th-century texts, Howard-Smith has spotted accounts from families who named their dogs, but would refer to “the cat” as only that.
Findings such as these have held true across several countries, but pet naming trends have never been universal. In Taiwan, for example, dogs and cats might get food names, onomatopoeic names, or even English human names, such as Jasper or Bill. They don’t, however, “get Chinese human names,” which hold particular significance, says Lindsey Chen, a linguist at National Taiwan Normal University. “We love them, but they’re not humans.” In Togo, the Kabre people sometimes name their dogs with pointed phrases—such as Paféifééri, or “they are shameless”—that, when spoken aloud, communicate their frustrations with other humans without confronting them directly.
American animals who lack human-esque names aren’t loved any less, but the degree of intimacy we have with modern companion animals may almost demand anthropomorphism. Joann Biondi, a photographer in Miami, does not view her Maine coon as a “pet”; a frequent model for her artwork, he is her travel companion, her roommate, her business partner—“a creature who shares my life,” she told me. When she adopted him 13 years ago, she wanted a name befitting of his dignified features. But he also “looked like a hairy Italian soccer player,” Biondi told me, so she chose Lorenzo, sometimes tacking “Il Magnifico” onto the end.
Several experts told me they’d feel a bit uncomfortable if a close family member decided to name a new pet after them. “There is still a reluctance to call animals things that really make them sound indistinguishable from a human,” Walker-Meikle told me. But some pet owners are downright inspired by that uncanny valley, including Sean O’Brien, an enterprise-software salesperson in Iowa, who deliberately sought out a very human name for his cockapoo, Kyle. “It’s just funny to see people’s reactions, like, ‘Did you say Kyle?’” he told me.
A smidge of the species barrier can still be found in the ways some owners play with their pets’ names. Howard-Smith’s family dogs, Winnie and Arabella, have been gifted some unhuman monikers: Babby Ween, the Weenerator; Bubs, Bubski, Ballubbers, Ballubber-lubbers. Volsche’s pug, Lucy, is frequently dubbed Pug Nugget, Chunky Monkey, and Lucy, Devourer of Snackies, Demander of Attention. My own cats, Calvin and Hobbes, enjoy titles such as Chumbowumbo, Chino Vatican, Fatticus Finch, Herbal Gerbil, and Classic Herbs. Children with nicknames this unhinged would suffer all kinds of public humiliation. But with pets, “I think we can be a bit freer,” Howard-Smith told me. It’s funny; it’s embarrassing; it’s “a snapshot into someone’s relationship with their pet.” These are the impromptu names that are offered up in private, and the animals can’t complain.
Means and Owens, Baby Jeff’s people, plan to keep giving their animals starkly human names. In addition to the cat, their home is also shared by a quartet of chickens: Ludwing van Beaktoven; Johenn Sebastian Bawk; Brittany, Jr. (named for Means, of course—“it was my turn,” she told me); and Little Rachel (named for their human roommate). The next bird they adopt will be named Henjamin, in honor of Means’s brother Ben. But Means and Owens, too, have a sense for which names just don’t feel quite right. “I knew this guy with a cat named Michael,” Means said. “Every time I think of it, it blows me away.”
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