Thebes is the Greek name for a city in Ancient Egypt, natively known as Waset, located about
800 km south of the Mediterranean, on the east bank of the river Nile within the modern
city of Luxor. The Theban Necropolis is situated nearby on the west bank of the Nile.
Name The Egyptian name of Thebes was Waset "City
of the Sceptre". The name Thebai is the Greek designation of opet, the Egyptian name of
the Karnak temple complex situated across the Nile, west of Thebes proper. Classical
Egyptian Ta-opet became Demotic ta-pe, which was adopted in Greek as thebai, assimilated
to the name of the Greek city. Due to its association with the Egyptian city, Greek
Thebes also had a statue and temple of Ammon from the 5th century BC. As attested already
in Homer's Iliad, the Greeks distinguished between the two cities as "Hundred-Gated Thebes"
for the Egyptian city, and "Seven-Gated Thebes" for its Greek counterpart.
As the seat of the Theban Triad of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, Thebes was known in the Egyptian
language from the end of the New Kingdom as niwt-imn, "The City of Amun." This found its
way into the Hebrew Bible as נא אמון nōʼ ʼāmôn, probably referring to the
Egyptian deity Amun-Ra, most likely it is also the same as נא. In Greek this name
was rendered Διόσπολις Diospolis, "City of Zeus", as Amun in the interpretatio
graeca became Greek Zeus Ammon. The Greeks surnamed the city μεγάλη
megale, "the Great", to differentiate it from numerous other cities called Diospolis. The
Romans rendered the name Diospolis Magna. History
Thebes was inhabited from around 3200 BC. It was the eponymous capital of Waset, the
fourth Upper Egyptian nome. Waset was the capital of Egypt during part of the 11th Dynasty
and most of the 18th Dynasty, when Hatshepsut built a Red Sea fleet to facilitate trade
between Thebes Red Sea port of Elim, modern Quasir, and Elat at the head of the Gulf of
Aqaba. According to George Modelski, Thebes had about 40,000 inhabitants in 2000 BC. By
1800 BC, the population of Memphis was down to about 30,000, making Thebes the largest
city in Egypt at the time. By the Amarna period, Thebes may have grown to be the largest city
in the world, with a population of about 80,000, a position which it held until about 1000
BC, when it was again surpassed by Memphis. With the 19th Dynasty the seat of government
moved to the Delta. The archaeological remains of Thebes offer a striking testimony to Egyptian
civilization at its height. The Greek poet Homer extolled the wealth of Thebes in the
Iliad, Book 9: "... in Egyptian Thebes the heaps of precious ingots gleam, the hundred-gated
Thebes." In 664 BC, the Assyrian army sacked Thebes
during their invasion of Upper Egypt. Archaeology
In 1979, the ruins of ancient Thebes were classified by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage
site. The two great temples—Luxor Temple and Karnak—and the Valley of the Kings and
the Valley of the Queens are among the great achievements of ancient Egypt.
Notes
References Gauthier, Henri. 1925–1931. Dictionnaire
des noms géographiques contenus dans les textes hieroglyphiques. Vol. 3 of 7 vols.
Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire.. 75,
76. Polz, Daniel C. 2001. "Thebes". In The Oxford
Encyclopedia of ancient Egypt, edited by Donald Bruce Redford. Vol. 3 of 3 vols. Oxford, New
York, and Cairo: Oxford University Press and The American University in Cairo Press. 384–388.
Redford, Donald Bruce. 1992. "Thebes". In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David
Noel Freedman. Vol. 6 of 6 vols. New York: Doubleday. 442–443. ISBN 0-385-42583-X
Strudwick, Nigel C., & Strudwick, Helen, Thebes in Egypt: A Guide to the Tombs and Temples
of Ancient Luxor. London: British Museum Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8014-3693-1/ISBN 0-8014-8616-5
External links More information on ancient Thebes, a World
Cultural Heritage site Theban Mapping Project
Ramesseum/Ancient Thebes Digital Media Archive, data from an Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities/CyArk
research partnership ICOMOS Heritage at Risk 2001/2002