Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 37

Thebes, Hierakonpolis, Memphis … We do not refer to cities with their ancient Egyptian names, but mostly with Greek designations. The Greeks used several ways to formulate the names of places in Egypt. When a city was most famous as the center of worship of an Egyptian god, they regularly named it after a manifestation of that god, often the animal form. Hierakonpolis meant “the city of the falcon” because it was a cult center of the god Horus, who was represented as a falcon. The Egyptian name was Nekhen. Heliopolis was “the city of the sun,” after the sun god; its Egyptian name was Iunu.

The Greeks could base their names on ancient Egyptian designations of an entire city or an important structure within it, and they tried to imitate the original sound. Such names sometimes replicated those of cities in Greece itself. Egyptian Abedju became Abydos, a city name also found in northern Greece. Memphis, the city near the pyramids in the north, derived its name from Mennufer, King Pepy I’s pyramid at Saqqara (a modern Arabic name that derives from Sokar, the god of the necropolis). In late Egyptian language Mennufer became Memfe, which the Greeks rendered as Memphis. The Egyptians also referred to the city as Ankh‐tawy, “The Life of the Two Lands,” because of its location at the junction of Upper and Lower Egypt.

At times, we do not know why the Greeks choose a name. The Egyptians called the religious center of the Middle and New Kingdoms Waset. The Greeks referred to the place as Thebes, which is also the name of one of the most important cities in central Greece. Although some scholars suggest that the Egyptian name of a district of Waset inspired the Greeks, it is possible that the city’s leading status was at the basis of the selection.

Sometimes we use the modern Arabic designation of a site as the primary name to refer to a place. Thus scholars most often speak of el‐Kab and el‐Amarna, which are the names of archaeological sites that contain the remains of the ancient cities of Nekheb and Akhetaten respectively. The modern Arabic name can contain traces of the ancient Egyptian one. For example, modern Qift derives its name from ancient Egyptian Gebtu, which became Kebto or Keft in Coptic. Other names show what impressed the later inhabitants in the ancient remains. The city Luxor derives its name from Arabic al‐Uqsur, which means “the palaces.”

Our modern designations are thus a mixed bag that we tend to use indiscriminately, and we mostly ignore their source. The ancient Egyptians often tried to indicate what they thought to be a city’s most important characteristic. For example, Naqada was near the city Nubt, which means gold, and it was called so because of its location across the Nile from the entrance of a wadi leading to gold mines. That may explain the area’s wealth in late prehistory, but our modern term conceals that fact.

By 3400 then, all of the elements of later Egyptian culture were in place. People knew how to farm relying on the Nile, they lived in settlements in the valley, and they buried the dead nearby. Their material remains show that Upper and Lower Egypt were distinct and that in Upper Egypt there was increased social differentiation, especially visible in the ways in which people were buried. Many other characteristics of later Egyptian ideology and world views probably also developed in these prehistoric times. In order to understand these ideas better we have to study the more elaborate information of historic times, however.