ἀρχέ-τῠπος

ἀρχέτυπος (archetupos, "ar-KHEH-too-poss") is the "archetype" — and the record's version of its life is small and pointed. It occurs just 2 times, across a single work: both in Plotinus's Enneads (2). The word does not roam the corpus; it lives, on this evidence, entirely inside one Neoplatonist's writing, where the question of an original pattern behind appearances is the native subject. A word for the first-made model turns out to be attested only where such models are the argument.

The one lexicon entry carries the sense cleanly. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 9th ed., 1940) glosses ἀρχέτυπος as "first-moulded as a pattern" — literally the thing stamped or moulded first, from which copies take their shape; hence "model, archetypal, exemplary, ideal." LSJ ranges it beside σφραγίς (sphragis, "seal, signet") and παράδειγμα (paradeigma, "pattern, exemplar"), the words for what impresses a form on what comes after. Notably, LSJ reaches into this very record for its comparative form: it cites the comparative -ώτερος, "more archetypal," directly from Plotinus (Plot. 6.8.14) — the same surface the concordance shows below.

No etymology pointer is matched in the record: the brief carries none, so nothing here can be attributed to Beekes, Chantraine, or Frisk. The shape of the compound is legible on its face — ἀρχε- from ἀρχή (arche, "beginning, origin") joined to -τυπος from τύπος (tupos, "stamp, impression, mould") — but the record supplies no dated authority for that reading, and so it is offered only as the visible form, not as a derivation.

The two cited surfaces are both Plotinian: ἀρχέτυπος, "archetypal," at Enneads 5.8 [plotinus:enneads:5.8:s4172], and the comparative ἀρχετυπώτερον, "more archetypal," at Enneads 6.8 [plotinus:enneads:6.8:s6302] — the very form LSJ pulled into its entry.

If a word for the original pattern survives chiefly as a comparative — one thing more archetypal than another — where does the first model finally rest?