the word "mason"
by
Bro. Watson Kirconnell
Published in THE FREEMASON, May-June, 1969
The history of the name for a Mason carries one back through strange and
unfamiliar territory.
Six and one half centuries before speculative Masonry began in the reign of
George I, the word mason was brought to England by those great builders, the
Normans. The English term is derived from the Old French masons (Modern French
Maçons) and this goes back to the medieval Latin machiones, of which Isodore of
Seville (who died in A.D. 640) explained that the masons were so called from the
machinae (scaffolding) on which they had to stand because of the height of their
walls.
With classical Latin we encounter an entirely new set of words: structor ("a
builder" later lengthened to constructor); caementarius ("Maker of a rough
ashlar," or caementum, from caedo, I cut); and latomus ("stone-cutter", a word
borrowed from the Greek). Classical Greek had at least four words for 'mason,'
based on two words for stone, las and lithos. They were latomos and lithomos
(both meaning "stone-cutter"); latypos ("stone-striker") and Lithourgos
("Stone-worker").
Remembering that in II Samuel, Ch.5, v. 11, King Hiram "sends masons" to King
David (This is earlier than his more familiar help to King Solomon), I looked up
the Hebrew text to find what the original term was. It turned out to be a triple
compound, haraash-ebhen-qir ("Cutter of stone for a wall"). Unlike the
scaffolding of the mediaeval machiones, the term in Latin, Greek and Hebrew are
aptly related to Speculative Freemasonry.
But stone-masonry did not originate in either Tyre or Jerusalem, not as late as
1000 B.C. Its beginnings were rather in Egypt, around 3,000 BC, when it was
created by the genius Imhotep. I therefore turned to Dr. Wallis Budge's Egyptian
Language (London, 1922) to find the hieroglyphic sign for a stone-mason. It is
pronounced "hus", and shows a worker with bared arms and lower legs, standing
beside a three-foot wall and testing it with a plumb-line! He even seems to be
wearing an apron. He is a striking anticipation of Amos, 7:7, in a hieroglyphic
that goes back to 3,000 BC., or 2,000 years before that prophet. In the
Jerusalem Bible, more accurately translated than the King James Version, verse 7
of Chapter 7 reads: "This is what the Lord Yahweh showed me: a man standing by a
wall, plumb-line in hand." In other words, what the Lord showed to the prophet
Amos of Tekoa in this third vision was a fellowcraft mason at work, as carved by
the Egyptians on obelisks and pyramids almost 5,000 years before our time.
The Junior Warden may well take pride in his symbolic jewel!
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