"My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.
She cast me into the river which rose not over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water".
For anyone that has only ever had the story of Moses told or read to them, they could be forgiven for assuming that the above is all about the biblical Moses aka " the lawgiver", but they would be wrong. The above is in fact a much older Mesopotamian original- by thousands of years. In fact what you would be reading in this instance is from the Legend of Sharru-kin, he who was to become Sargon the Great of Akkad. And it wouldn't be for the first time that biblical stories have been taken from much older Mesopotamian legends , either.
The Birth of Moses begins in Exodus 2:
"And a man of the house of Levi went and took as wife a daughter of Levi. So the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him three months. But when she could no longer hide him, she took an ark of bulrushes for him, daubed it with asphalt and pitch, put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river’s bank. And his sister stood afar off, to know what would be done to him".
We are then informed that Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in the crocodile infested river Nile where she happened upon the baby Law Giver.
The "Drawer of Water" is noteworthy because according to Exodus 2:10, Moses was given his name by the Pharaoh's daughter who ' drew him from the water'.
When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.” Exodus 2:10
In Hebrew the name Moses is rendered as Mosheh derived maybe from the Hebrew word moshe which means 'the drawer out'. With that said, I find it hard to believe that this Princess of royal Egyptian stock would have been educated in the Hebrew language and etymology? And why not an Egyptian name? Either way, I have no doubt in my mind that the whole story is a restructuring of the Mesopotamian Legend of Sharru-kin.
I have written on this site somewhere before, the name Moses has been studied by Archaeologist, Assyriologist, Egyptologist and historians and all appear to have come to the same conclusion that the Egyptian name Moses is actually a title and derives from the the Egyptian word mose (Greek: mosis). Which simply relates to offspring or heir. Examples would be - Tuthmose (Tuthmoses): born of Thoth. Amenmose (Amenmosis): born of Amen.
Amen, interesting that the gnostic gospels have Jesus demanding he be called "The Amen".