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I can’t find any source for that outside of Wikipedia and the only words I can find in other languages that sound similar mostly mean “hotel.” There’s always the chance that it comes from an obscure source or it’s spelled in an unusual way, but given that Google searches containing his name only turn up results about him, I’d say that it’s probably made-up. Wondering if the “Egyptian” mention was significant, I looked through a dictionary of Ancient Egyptian words and came up with nothing. The language was written without vowels, so I was looking at words beginning with “t,” but there weren’t even any “t” words that contained an “l”. I didn’t search through Egyptian Arabic words, so I guess that’s a possibility too, but the standard Arabic words for explorer and wanderer sound completely different.

This message was edited 8/7/2018, 10:21 AM

If you go through the archived link on Wikipedia where they cited that information, it says that it means "explorer" or "wanderer" in Egyptian... which isn't a language. Arabic is the language spoken in Egypt.

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Hopefully someone with more Arabic knowledge will reply, but closest I can get is التائه "drifter, wanderer", which is transcribed as altayih which is kind of similar? I'd take it with a grain of salt.