A speculation about the age of names.

So, james_nicoll was wondering about how long a specific name might be in use (because of a book he's reading in which a name in current use is used six thousand years in the future).

I am speculating that "Esther" and "Mordechai" might be contenders. They're Hebrew versions of "Ishtar" and "Marduk".

So, my argument is that we can date the names "Ishtar" and "Marduk" to, let's say, somewhere possibly as early as 2000 BCE. And at some point, they became used as names for humans, too, like "Jesús" is today.

So, it's not a completely unreasonable speculation that they might have been used as names for about 1400 years, until about ~600 BCE, when Jewish exiles in Babylon began using those names. And they have been in continuous use in Judaism for the past 2600 years.

So I'm willing to speculate that "Ishtar" and "Marduk" have been used as names continuously for the past four thousand years.

Anyone want to make an argument for an older name, or shoot holes in my idea?