Ekeberg's name is a piece of mythological wit grounded in a chemical observation. Tantalus, a king of Greek legend, offended the gods and was condemned in the underworld to stand forever in a pool of water beneath a fruit-laden branch, yet whenever he stooped to drink the water receded and whenever he reached for the fruit the branch drew away, so that he was eternally tantalised, the source of the very word. Ekeberg found that the oxide of his new element, immersed in acid, would not take it up or dissolve, standing amid the acid as unable to drink as Tantalus himself. The kinship deepened when niobium, the sister element found with it, was named after Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, fixing father and daughter side by side in the periodic table.
Accounts of Tantalus's original crime vary across ancient sources: some say he stole ambrosia and nectar from the gods' own table to share with mortals, others that he killed his son Pelops and served the boy's flesh to the gods to test their omniscience, a horror the gods detected and punished by restoring Pelops to life; either version casts Tantalus as a mortal who presumed too far on divine hospitality, a fitting frame for an element whose oxide likewise refuses to yield to the acid pressed upon it.