mḏdw

From mḏd (“to strike true, to stay true to, to drive in, to share out, to impose as an obligation”) +‎ -w. The exact sense is disputed, with a number of proposed hypotheses, but it must certainly be related to Khufu’s Two Ladies name mḏd-r-nbtj, itself of disputed interpretation. Baud takes the term as an active participle synonymous with the epithet šzp-mḏd.f (“(he who) receives his dues”), or alternatively suggests an interpretation such as ‘he who reaches the goal’, but rejects earlier suggestions by Montet (‘he who imposes’), Sethe (‘faithful, attached’), Barta (‘he who is guided, directed’), and Gundlach (‘he who shares out’). Leprohon interprets it as a passive participle, ‘[he] who has been adhered to/followed’ (= ‘stayed true to’).

• (modern Egyptological) IPA^(key): /mɛd͡ʒɛduː/
  • Conventional anglicization: medjedu

 m

1. A serekh name notably borne by Khufu, a pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty

• “mḏdw (lemma ID 400276)”, in Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae‎, Corpus issue 17, Web app version 2.01 edition, Tonio Sebastian Richter & Daniel A. Werning by order of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert & Peter Dils by order of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 2004–15 December 2022
• Leprohon, Ronald (2013) Denise Doxey, editor, The Great Name: Ancient Egyptian Royal Titulary, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, →ISBN, page 35
• von Beckerath, Jürgen (1984) Handbuch der ägyptischen Königsnamen, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, →ISBN, pages 52, 178
• Baud, Michel (1998) “Une épithète de Rêdjedef et la prétendue tyrannie de Chéops. Étude sur la statuaire de Rêdjedef, II.” in Le Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, volume 98, pages 15–30
• Erman, Adolf, Grapow, Hermann (1928) Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache‎, volume 2, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, →ISBN, page 192.10