DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.4031#0014
HERACLEOPOLIS MAGNA;
ITS ORIGIN AND ITS NAME.
About twelve miles north-west of the town of
Beni Suef, the great canal which bounds the
cultivated land, i.e. the Bahr Yusui, makes a
strong curve towards the east. There it skirts
huge mounds of decayed houses, covered with
masses of broken pottery, and a few granite
monuments scattered here and there amongst
them. The mounds extend over an area of
360 acres. They are popularly known as Omm
el Keman, the Mother of Mounds, because of
their size. The Copts called the place Almas ;
its official name is Henassiet el Medineh, the
city of Henassieh, and it has long been recog-
nized as the site of Heracleopolis Magna.
The greater part of these mounds is waste
land, utilized by the inhabitants for sebakh
digging only. This is especially the case with
the mound called Kom el Dinar. But several
hamlets and villages now occupy the site, the
most important of them being the one called
Melaha. Just in front of this village are
four standing columns, called the Keniseh, or
church, and belonging to a B,oman or Byzantine
edifice. Two abandoned saltpetre pits are also
to be found. They were used at the beginning
of this century in the manufacture of gun-
powder for the Mameluks and Mohammed Ali.
Although this was the occasion of much dig-
ging, it does not seem to have led to the
discovery of any antiquities. The place must
have been important in the time of the Greek
emperors, before the Mohammedan conquest,
for it contains the ruins of several Coptic
churches—chiefly bases and shafts of columns,
some of them very large. But nothing indi-
cated the site of an ancient Egyptian temple,
and yet there had been more than one. It
was by mere guess-work that we discovered
the place where the god Arsaphes had his
dwelling, and we made many soundings before
we hit upon it in a depression west of the
Kom el Dinar. One may form an idea of the
labour required for discovering and clearing
the remains of this temple, when [ say that,
to this end, I was obliged to remove more
than 40,000 cubic metres of earth. We do not
know at what date Heracleopolis was founded,
but very anciently it was one of the important
cities of Egypt. Manetho says that the IXth
and Xth Dynasties were Heracleopolitan, and,
even from the scanty information which has
come down to us, we must conclude that Hera-
cleopolis played an important part in the
events of that obscure period. The tombs of
Sioot, attributed to the Xth Dynasty by M.
Maspero and Mr. Griffith, describe the wars
waged on behalf of their Heracleopolitan
sovereign by the vassal princes of Sioot, pro-
bably against rebels from Thebes. Hence,
there is frequent mention of the city of Hera-
cleopolis in these inscriptions, and even the
name of one of the kings who is supposed to
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