Philologos on "The Elephants of Khartoum"

PHILOLOGOS discusses a reader's question about The Elephants of Khartoum. Excerpt:

The city of Khartoum began as an army outpost established in 1821 by the Egyptian ruler Ibrahim Pasha, who chose for it the strategic point at which the White Nile, flowing northward from Lake Victoria, and the Blue Nile, flowing westward from the highlands of Ethiopia, join in one river. At their confluence is an island that, surveyed from the heights on the river’s banks, lacks only an eye to look exactly like the trunk of an elephant attached to the lower jaw and forehead. Called el-khartum, “the elephant’s trunk,” this gave Khartoum its name.

In Hebrew, the original meaning of ḥartom is a bird’s beak, and the word’s earliest textual appearance is in a discussion in the mishnaic tractate of Teharot. Yet since birds’ beaks and elephants’ trunks are anatomically analogous, khartum and ḥartom are clearly related, as they also are to Hebrew ḥotem and Arabic khatm, both meaning “nose.” And since the prow of a ship is, so to speak, its beak or nose, ḥartom in modern Hebrew came to mean a prow, from which its further extension to the nose cone of a rocket was but a small step.

This leaves us with Pharaoh’s “magicians,” as the King James Version of the Bible calls them. Lately, their antics in vying with Moses and Aaron at such tricks as turning staffs into snakes, described in the weekly Torah portions from the first chapters of the Book of Exodus, have been entertaining the synagogue-goers among us. In the Hebrew Bible, the term for them is ḥartumim, a word that always appears in the plural but whose form in the singular would indeed be, as Mr. Rabbie observes, ḥartom. Is this connected to elephant trunks, bird beaks and rocket cones?

I’m sorry to say it isn’t. The ḥartom of Exodus is a word, unrelated to any other in Hebrew, that comes from ancient Egyptian. ...