Back to naming things. The tradition for naming things in our solar system (for things NASA has launched) has been to use names from Greek and Roman mythology, and so seven of the eight planets in order from the sun are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Curiously, our planet, Earth, is named from the Anglo/Saxon word "eorthe" generally meaning soil, or ground.
The ESA used names drawn from Egyptian history and culture for this project. The "mother ship" that carried the probe is "Rosetta," an allusion to the three-sided black basalt rock/stone found by French military forces in Egypt in 1799 near Rashid (Rosetta). The Stone is inscribed in three languages, the translations of which were finally made in 1822 by the French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion. He recognized that the inscriptions on one side were in Ancient Greek, which he was able to translate. Then he guessed correctly that the other two sides carried the same information, in hieroglyphics and in the Ancient Egyptian script "demotic." Thus the Rosetta Stone opened the door to reading and understanding the two written languages of Ancient Greece and thus the whole history of that remarkable culture. So Rosetta is a perfect name for the project that seeks to unlock, on that comet, some of the secrets even perhaps of the beginning of the universe itself. More: http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html
The little probe that separated from Rosetta and finally bounced twice and then settled on the comet is Philae, named for an island in the Upper Nile River that was the site of several ancient temples to the deities of Egyptian mythology. The original landing spot on the comet that Philae was aiming for was dubbed Agilkia, the name of another island in the Nile.
ESA could have just used the general system created by the Earthlings who have studied the heavens since the beginning of time and who (much more recently!) have been tracking objects either already known (like stars and comets) or sent from Earth into space and who have applied names like 67P (combinations of letters and numbers) or else names associated with cultures. Instead, ESA chose the names from Ancient Egyptian history and culture that specifically allude to an astonishing find (the inscribed Rosetta Stone) that led to unlocking the story of an extraordinarily rich ancient culture (Egypt) . . . and that lends a wonderful dimension of ideas and familiarity and promise of knowledge to come that can't possibly be conveyed with anonymous combinations of letters and numbers. The comet's name had no meaning other than its place on a list of similar number/letter combinations. But now it is home to an astounding expression of human ingenuity, with a name, Philae.
