Egyptian Site Names

One of the particular challenges in dealing with early excavations in Egypt is the naming of sites and their variant spellings. Names might be assigned to a site on a number of criteria: • assumed to match a place mentioned in Biblical or Classical texts o E.g. Tell el-Maskhuta was incorrectly identified by E.E.F. excavator Edouard Naville as Pithom in 1883. Contemporary distribution lists of finds from that excavation refer to ‘Pithom’; • derived from transliterations of the hieroglyphic form of ancient place names o E.g. Nekhen, where the hawk god Horus was worshipped for Hierakonpolis (Greek ‘city of the hawk’); • taken from the modern Arabic name ascribed to the area or the nearest topographical feature by the local population. The Arabic definite article el-/al- might or might not be included. Some topographical features are so common that there are several sites with the same name o E.g. Kom el-Ahmar ‘the red mound’, found in both the south at Hierakonpolis and north of Egypt at Hebenu (Minya district); • transcribed from local oral testimony o E.g. Kahun for Lahun (see below) • attributed by modern geographers, which is further complicated by the varying transliteration of one script/language to another, such as Arabic into European languages (e.g. endings –eh, -ah, -a). As a result, the same physical place can bear a huge variety of names and name forms depending on who published the site and when, with the same site being named differently in published reports, archives, and on museum labels. Different areas of a single large site can be given different names. Example  (el-)Lahun is the Arabic name for a modern Egyptian town at the entrance to the Fayyum. The site is famous for the pyramid of Senusret II and its associated ancient town. When Flinders Petrie first visited the site in 1887 he enquired what the name of the site was with a local man, who probably referred to it as ‘Medinet Kahun’ (with the K/Q almost silent in the local dialect). Some people refer to the ancient town as ‘Kahun’ to differentiate it from the pyramid. Lahun is now the more commonly used name for the ancient settlement. In antiquity, both the town and the pyramid were known by the name Hetep-Senwosret (perhaps ‘Senwosret is satisfied’). There are many variations, however: el-Lahun; el Lahun; el-Lahoun; el Lahoun; Lahun, el; Lahun, el-; Illahun; Kahun; Kahoun; Ptolemaios Hormos (ancient Greek). None of these iterations of the site name is wrong; however, both the layman and the professional can be confused as to what place is being referred to in the literature.