Thebes, Egypt

Thebes (Ancient Greek: Θῆβαι, Thēbai), known to the ancient Egyptians as Waset, was an ancient Egyptian city located east of the Nile about 800 kilometers (500 mi) south of the Mediterranean. Its ruins lie within the modern Egyptian city of Luxor. Thebes was the main city of the fourth Upper Egyptian nome (Sceptre nome). It was close to Nubia and the eastern desert, with their valuable mineral resources and trade routes. It was a cult center and the wealthiest city of ancient Egypt at its heyday. The site of Thebes includes areas on both the eastern bank of the Nile, where the temples of Karnak and Luxor stand and the city proper situated; and the western bank, where a necropolis of large private and royal cemeteries and funerary complexes can be found.

Toponymy

The Ancient Egyptians originally knew Thebes as Waset (wꜣs.t), the "City of the Was". A was was the scepter of the pharaohs, a long staff with an animal's head and a forked base.

Thebes is the Latinized form of the Greek Thebai, the hellenized form of the Demotic Egyptian Ta-pe. This was the local name not for the city itself but for the Karnak temple complex beside the necropolis on the west bank of the river. (Ta-opet in formal Egyptian.) As early as Homer's Iliad, the Greeks distinguished the Egyptian Thebes as Thebes of the Hundred Gates, (Θῆβαι ἑκατόμπυλοι, Thēbai hekatómpyloi) as opposed to the "Thebes of the Seven Gates" (Θῆβαι ἑπτάπυλοι, Thēbai heptapyloi) in Boeotia, Greece.