Naville, Edouard: The store-city of Pithom and the route of the Exodus (London, 1888)

nrfer ab or ab nefer. The local god was Turn land wag
Harmachis, with the distinctive epithet of j^,1

the living.

The capital of the nome bears the civil

name of Q ,2 ° ^ Q ^ Q , ®, 2Vm^, 17m-
Z;e^ or Thukut.

The religious name is

,3 JI<x Turn,

the abode of Turn, the god of the nome, or
the same written in the more frequent form

^f) x.QM Q,4 ^tTl ,5 Pi Turn, Pithom. "When

this city is mentioned there is generally added

/ 4 | Q, which is at the Eastern door.

The religious name of the city considered as
the residence of its god thus consisted of the name
of Turn, preceded by the word ^ or y, abode

or house, and often followed by the determi-
native ©. It is the same with a great number
of Egyptian cities. Thus we have Bubastis

and 13',-Thebes ^ or

i

Memphis and |°y, Buto and

Another locality which is mentioned in con-
nection with the nome is ^ ^ ^ iPt ,6 Se

Kerehet, ' the abode of the serpent.'

The divisions of the nome are the following:
The es, the canal, is called ^^^^Ti^

T (a awwv fiK' I .c^^ Jryi t=t ,7 or accord-

ing to a papyrus _^ ^> -s^ £g£ ,8 Eharm a

or Khalma.

The territory, was called ^^^j"

or /wvJ(2s=) s or Jw3 and the marsh-

1 Eouge Edfou, pi. 145.

2 Duem. €reog. Iaschr. I. 62, etc.

3 Duem. 1.1. HL 146, etc.

4 Duem. 1.1. II., pi. 98.
6 Id. III., pi. 29.

c Rouge Edfou, pi. 145.

' Vide the lists quoted above.

" Anast. V. 11, 4. Brugsch. Zeitschr. 1876, p. 127.

the scorpion.

Besides the lists, and the texts of a purely geo-
graphical character, we find in the papyri several
of the names belonging to the nome. The most

frequent is ^ ^ , ThuJcu, which occurs

repeatedly in the letters of the scribes and
officials of the XlXth dynasty, contained in
the so-called Anastasi papyri.9 We see there
that the name of Thuku has the determina-
tive of a borderland inhabited by foreigners.

It was under the rule of a C ; ^ ,10 lieu-

tenant or wakeel. It contained a fortification

called P Z5^x xx

m, the skair of Thuku11

or ^0,1. Khetem of Thuku,13 and what
is more important, it contained Pithom, as we
see from this sentence, to which we shall refer
farther, the lakes of Pithom of Menephthes, which
is of, or which belongs to, Thuku. It is clear
from those inscriptions that before becoming the
civil name of the capital, Thuku was the name of
a region, a district which contained Pithom, and
it had that meaning under the XlXth dynasty.

Having now gathered all the information
which may be derived from the geographical
lists and the papyri, let us examine the names
which we find on the monuments discovered at
Tell el Maskhutah, and we shall see that they
contain a complete description of the nome.

We must first notice what we observed
both in the documents and on the stones ex-
hibited at Ismailiah, that all the monuments are
dedicated to the god Turn Harmachis, or
belong to a priest attached to the worship of
that god. The geographical name which we
find most frequently is that of Thuku, Thukut;
it is met with in the different forms described

9 Anast. V. 19, 2, 3, 8 • 25, 2; 26,1; VI. 4.

10 Anast. V. 25, 2.

11 Anast. V. 19, 8.
13 Anast. VI. 4, 16.