1 ‘We The North’Footnote ³: The Egyptian Toponymic Tradition

In the Egyptian language, the Delta was called (t3)-mḥw, ‘Lower Egypt’, which is most probably etymologically related to (t3)-mḥty, ‘Northern Land’.Footnote ⁴ The toponym is attested as early as the Old Kingdom, and found written in a variety of forms through time and scripts. Its etymology is still debated, and the question deserves a complete lexicographical analysis, which goes beyond the scope of this chapter. For now, let’s just mention that it might be semantically related to mḥty, ‘North’, and that both words are linked to and also at times written using the papyrus-like hieroglyphs mḥ.w (M15 or M16 , which represent, respectively, a clump of papyrus with buds and a clump of papyrus), which are also used to refer to the papyrus marshes of the Delta.Footnote ⁵

The link between these different words and concepts is deeply experiential and environmentally anchored. Indeed, ancient Egyptians were orienting themselves facing south – that is, facing the direction towards which the Nile’s slope was rising, and from which its water originated. Accordingly, the south was conceived as the ‘head’, the ‘summit’ and the ‘prior’, while the North, where the papyrus marshes abounded, was the ‘posterior’, the ‘arrears’ and the ‘end’ of the Nile.Footnote ⁶ It remains uncertain which of the words inspired the other. The toponym (t3)-mḥw thus refers to the position of the region within the broader Nilotic basin. As such, it testifies to an indigenous, embodied conception of the local landscape, and by extension an articulation of the cardinal orientation of the world beyond it, from within the Nile basin. For, as Georges Posener put it, the Nile was ancient Egyptians’ meridian.Footnote ⁷

The essence and the coherence of the Delta thus resides not only in the fact that it encompasses the lowest, deltaic, and therefore wetter, courses of the river, but also in that it is structurally and environmentally distinct from t3 šm῾w (Upper Egypt),Footnote ⁸ the second of the kingdom’s ‘Two Lands’ (t3wy).Footnote ⁹ This meaning endured throughout the history of the Egyptian language, as the Coptic toponym used to designate the Delta (ⲧⲥⲁϦⲏⲧ/ⲡⲥⲁⲙⲉⲛϩⲓⲧFootnote ¹⁰) shows.

The Egyptian t3-mḥw made its way into Greek and Latin. Indeed, literary and papyrological sources attest to the expressions Κάτω Αἴγυπτος and Κάτω Χώρα, which respectively mean ‘Low Egypt’ and ‘Low Country/Land’. Their Latin equivalents are Aegyptius Inferior and Chora Inferior. The Greek word κάτω conveys the idea of going ‘down’, ‘downwards’ and ‘below’. In both cases, though, its use indicates that the toponym is meant to describe and locate the region within the Nilotic topography.

Κάτω Αἴγυπτος and Aegyptius Inferior are attested twelve times in total in ancient authors, mostly (eleven or c. 92%) in Latin. They are, however, not attested in any known documentary text. In contrast, Κάτω Χώρα and Chora Inferior are found twenty-two times in documentary papyri and six times in literary texts, mostly in Greek. The evidence stretches from the third century BCE to the seventh and eighth centuries CE, indicating that it was in use throughout the Hellenistic, Roman and early Arab periods. We shall come back to the implications of the discrepancy between the uses of Κάτω Αἴγυπτος/Aegyptius Inferior and of Κάτω Χώρα/Chora Inferior below.Footnote ¹¹ For now, I shall point to Claudius Ptolemy, who, in his Geography, specifies that Κάτω Χώρα was the expression commonly used by locals to refer to the Delta.Footnote ¹² In the conclusion to his description of the hydrography of the Nile Delta, and right before the section where he lists the region’s nomes and metropoleis, he writes, ‘what is round about these rivers is commonly called Katō Xōra’.Footnote ¹³ This equivalence is nuanced in 4.5.55, where he defines the ‘Heptanomoi’ as the seven nomes located south ‘of the Great Delta and Katō Xōra’.Footnote ¹⁴ This passage indicates both a distinction and an overlap between the fluvial distributaries that make up the Great Delta, and the agrarian landscape encompassed and shaped by that Delta (Katō Xōra). The first expression pertains to the river system; the second, to the alluvial, arable land.

Κάτω Χώρα and Chora Inferior were also used to render an Egyptian expression that referred to Lower Egypt. Indeed, we find Κάτω Χώρα and Ἄνω Χώρα used as translations of the Pharaonic title Pr-῾3 n n3 tš.w nt ḥry jrm n3 tš.w nt ẖry (which literally means ‘King of the districts above (ḥry) and the districts below (ẖry)’) in two Ptolemaic decrees written in Demotic, Greek and Hieroglyphic and known, respectively, as the Decree of Raphia and the Decree of Memphis.Footnote ¹⁵ In this context, the plural use of tšw, ‘nomes’ or ‘districts’, implies a grouping of all of Lower Egyptian and Upper Egyptian nomes. This expression affirms the official, dual conception of Egypt’s territory, but also showcases the administrative distinctiveness of these two regions. This practice continues in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, as is evidenced by the introduction of the epistrategy, an administrative division that was made up of several nomes, whose chief official was endowed with military and civilian duties in the Ptolemaic period, and of an exclusively civilian nature in Roman times. In several of the Greek papyri listed in TM Geo, Κάτω Χώρα appears as the name of the epistrategy or regional administrative division of Egypt that corresponded to the Nile Delta.Footnote ¹⁶

The other documentary contexts in which Κάτω Χώρα and Chora Inferior are found are also essentially official. These include papyri pertaining to business-related travels,Footnote ¹⁷ a conventus itinerary,Footnote ¹⁸ an imperial edict of HadrianFootnote ¹⁹ and a judicial protocol.Footnote ²⁰ The expression Κάτω Χώρα also appears in three official documents as a complement of the Diospolitan Nome, to distinguish it from its Upper Egyptian homonym.Footnote ²¹ Lastly, an early Arab period papyrus mentions the pagarchy of Heliopolis ‘in Lower Egypt’.Footnote ²² In all cases, therefore, the expression is imbued with a territorial, administrative meaning.

The same translation was involved in the Arabisation of the two regions’ names. Indeed, el-Sa’id, which designates Upper Egypt, is tied to the Arabic verb صعد, ‘to rise, go up, ascend’. The Arabic equivalent of Lower Egypt is مصر السفلى (Maṣr alsouflah; literally ‘Lower Egypt’). Like the English ‘Lower Egypt’ and its other equivalent in modern European languages, the expression is now essentially used in academic, mostly Egyptological, geological and geographical scholarship.Footnote ²³ The word Egyptians use to talk about the Delta is, literally, ‘Delta’, as in دلتا النيل (‘Nile Delta’) and الدلتا (‘The Delta’). As we shall see below, this is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon. Indeed, as Jean-Charles Ducène notes, as far as the pre-modern period is concerned, ‘Arabs never saw Lower Egypt as a Delta, which is a purely Greek notion.’Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, medieval texts and maps most commonly designate the region using the expression Asfal al-arḍ (‘The Lower Land’), Asfal al-arḍ Maṣr, Maṣr alsouflah or Maṣr alone.Footnote ²⁵

2 Three-Cornered Land: The Greek Toponymic Tradition

According to TM Geo, the word Δέλτα and its Latin form Delta are used forty-one times in ancient literary texts. This corpus covers a period ranging from the fourth century BCE to the twelfth century CE. The earliest of these sources is Herodotus’ Histories, which was written ca. 440 BCE, and where the word ‘Delta’ appears fourteen times in total.Footnote ²⁶ Its first occurrence in the Histories is in book 2.13. There, Herodotus, who has witnessed the region’s topography first hand, writes about the ‘Egyptians who dwell lower (ἔνερθε) than the lake Moeris, and chiefly those who inhabit what is called the Delta (τὸ καλεόμενον Δέλτα)’.Footnote ²⁷ A little later, in 2.15, he indicates that this toponym (τὸ Δέλτα) was attributed in his lifetime to the Ionians.Footnote ²⁸ Overall, Herodotus’ use and commentary on the word Delta indicates that he expected his audience to be familiar with the term. This implies an earlier motivation, whose exact dating cannot be determined, but which must be understood within the context of the relationship between northern Egypt, Ionia and the broader Greek-speaking world.

That a geometric and alphabetical metaphor was behind the motivation of the toponym Δέλτα is made explicit in Prometheus Bound, a tragedy attributed to Aeschylus and written around the same time as Herodotus’ Histories. There, as Prometheus instructs Io on how to reach the Nile Delta, where she is destined to found a settlement, he says:

A little more than two centuries later, Polybius, in his discussion of Hannibal’s crossing of the Rhone, describes a district called ‘the Island’ as a delta, whose shape is similar to the Nile’s:

Polybius does not explicitly state that the Rhone and Nile deltas have a triangular shape, but his geometric description corresponds, literally, to the definition of a triangle. This passage also documents another common metaphor used by Greek and Latin authors to refer to Lower Egypt: the insular one. Indeed, because it was viewed as being bordered by three bodies of water, the Delta is at times equated to an island by ancient classical writers. We find this allusion already in Herodotus,Footnote ³¹ as well as in first-century BCE Diodorus who, in the first book of his Library of History, includes the Delta among the islands formed by the river Nile:

Strabo, who writes at the turn of the era, offers us the most detailed and explicit commentary on the Greco-Roman, triangular and insular, conceptualisation of the region:

Strabo’s claim that locals call the Delta Lower Egypt is backed up by papyrological evidence. Indeed, while ‘Delta’ has been absorbed into many languages, it does not seem to have had a substantial impact among ancient native Egyptians and local Greek speakers. Indeed, a search for Egypt’s ‘Delta’ in TM Geo gives only nine attestations found in eight documentary sources. All but one are in Greek, and the documents date from between the third century BCE and the second century CE.Footnote ³⁴ All of them were produced in contexts pertaining to Greek settlers’ (business) travels or to the Hellenistic and Roman provincial administration. The earliest attestations of the toponym Δέλτα in documentary evidence are third-century BCE papyri belonging to the Zenon archive,Footnote ³⁵ the ‘Revenue Laws’ of Ptolemy IIFootnote ³⁶ and a wax tablet containing a series of bills.Footnote ³⁷ In all preserved papyri, Delta is mentioned as the location of payments or purchases (to be) made. The Delta is also named, in tandem with the Thebaid, in the well-known dedication to Aelius Aristides (I.Portes du Désert 4ter, 6 = OGIS 2 709). The toponyms appear in a formula considered by some to be a literary patchwork that draws from Herodotus.Footnote ³⁸

The only Latin example of the toponym Delta in a documentary text is in P.Mich. 8 467, a second-century CE letter that belongs to the bilingual (Greek and Latin) archive of Claudius Tiberianus, a veteran of the Roman army who had retired in Karanis and had maybe served as a soldier there. In that particular letter, Claudius Terentianus, who might well be his son, contacts him in the context of his enrolment in the Roman navy at Alexandria. Towards the end of the letter, he writes:

Given that Terentianus’ mother tongue appears to have been Greek, and that his Latin letters contain a fair amount of influence from Greek,Footnote ⁴⁰ we can reasonably assume that ad Delta referred to the same settlement or district of Δέλτα found in other papyri.Footnote ⁴¹ More broadly, this letter is also one of many testimonies of the close economic, social, cultural and military ties that existed between the western Nile Delta, including the Alexandrian region (and, in this particular context, the village of Tonis, close to Alexandria, where a part of Tiberianus’ family was in all likelihood settled) and the Fayyum.Footnote ⁴² I shall come back on this particular papyrus below.

That we find no Egyptian translation or transliteration of Δέλτα in any ancient Egyptian scripts, including Coptic, is indicative of two possible scenarios: Either the toponym Delta was never adopted or adapted into the Egyptian language or, if it was, it remained a confidential phenomenon that did not compete with the native toponymic tradition until its much later adoption by Arab speakers.

Indeed, the Arabic use of Delta (الدلتا) to refer to Lower Egypt is a recent phenomenon. To my knowledge, the earliest attestation of the toponym is found in the 1865 translation of an 1841 book On the History of the Crusades written by a French man named Maxime de Montrond:Footnote ⁴³

Two observations ought to be made: First, the passage above pertains to the ancient Greek toponym Delta. It should therefore not be taken as evidence of modern, local uses. Second, it appears in the translation of a French book. Judging from available evidence, the term Delta gradually made its way into Egyptian Arabic as the common word used to designate Lower Egypt starting from that period. This recent phenomenon must therefore be understood within the context of the British occupation of Egypt and, more broadly, of the powerful ties that linked European colonial culture and ‘the Classics’.Footnote ⁴⁵

3 Two Names, One Space

To sum up, the literary and documentary evidence discussed above documents, quantitatively and also qualitatively, the enduring influence of the Egyptian toponymic tradition in the way the Nile Delta was named locally. This trend did not go out of style in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This makes perfect sense, and is in line with what we know more broadly about ancient Egypt’s toponymy.Footnote ⁴⁶

Most of the evidence in Table 2.1 is in locally produced documentary texts, be they papyri or inscriptions. These amount to 127 or 68% of all attestations compiled in TM Geo. Second, close to half (91/186 or ca. 49%) of all the toponyms listed are written in one of the ancient Egyptian scripts; that is, in decreasing quantitative order, Demotic, (abnormal) Hieratic and Hieroglyphic. If we exclude the literary evidence, all of which is in Greek and Latin, the proportion of Egyptian texts rises to ca. 72% (91/127). Since, as we’ve just seen, pre-eighth-century BCE toponyms and Coptic ones are not accounted for, it is reasonable to expect the proportion of known Egyptian evidence to be substantially higher. Third, while the term Delta proved to have a long-lasting influence on modern (notably European) toponymy, the data compiled in TM Geo shows a different picture. Indeed, 136 or 73% of all toponyms listed stem from the Egyptian tradition. This speaks not only to the strong pull of the Egyptian toponymic practices, but also to the corollary acknowledgement and integration, through transliteration (Aramaic) or translation (Greek and Latin), of local toponymic practices by settler populations and occupying administrations (see Table 2.2).

Of the fifty-nine literary entries, forty-one or 70% correspond to the term Delta in Greek (27) or Latin (14).Footnote ⁴⁷ The eighteen remaining ones include what appear to be the two versions of the Greek and Latin translations of mḥw: Κάτω Αἴγυπτος/Aegyptus Inferior (12) and Κάτω Χώρα/Chora Inferior (6). While the first expression is listed as a variant of mḥw, ‘Kato Chora’ appears as a separate entry with its own TM Geo number. It is unclear why this decision was made, all the more so that the Greek noun χώρα is a more exact translation of the Egyptian noun t3, ‘land’, which is found in some variants of the Egyptian toponyms.

Are Κάτω Αἴγυπτος and Κάτω Χώρα two different toponyms referring to two different geographical regions? Are these expressions used in different contexts or at different times? Or are they simply coeval translations of t3-mḥw used indiscriminately? A look at what documentary texts say proves illuminating. Indeed, none of the texts listed in TM Geo contains the expression Κάτω Αἴγυπτος/Aegyptus Inferior. By contrast, twenty occurrences of Κάτω Χώρα/Chora Inferior are found. Given the overall excellent coverage of papyrological and epigraphical texts in Greek and Latin by TM Geo, the complete absence of Κάτω Αἴγυπτος in the local documentation might well be indicative of the fact that this expression was not in use in Egypt, where the more literal Κάτω Χώρα prevailed.

This seems all the more likely since, as noted above, the toponym appears in the Decrees of Raphia and Memphis, which are clearly translations of the Egyptian.Footnote ⁴⁸ The nature of the literary evidence is also indicative of the external motivation of Κάτω Αἴγυπτος/Aegyptus Inferior: the only Greek occurrence is in Strabo (Hist. 17.1.35Footnote ⁴⁹), and apart from one mention in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (5.6.40Footnote ⁵⁰), all ten remaining mentions of Aegyptus Inferior are actually much later in date (fifth to sixteenth centuries CE). By contrast, Κάτω Χώρα, and in three cases Chora Inferior, are attested from the third century BCE to the fourth to eighth centuries CE in documentary evidence, and in the first to second centuries CE in literary ones. The Latin form is so far only known in Pliny the Elder, whose testimony goes in the same direction as our hypothesis. For he writes that what is known as ‘Aegyptio Inferior is called Chora’.Footnote ⁵¹ I would therefore like to suggest that the toponym (t3-)mḥw was translated in Greek into Κάτω Χώρα, and that this form was commonly used by local Greek speakers. Meanwhile, Greek and Latin writers and later scholars of the medieval and early modern period who wrote, emulated and engaged with them in Latin from outside of Egypt, adopted the expression Aegyptus Inferior. Despite these differences, both Egyptian and Greek, as well as insiders and outsiders, experienced and maintained the central role played by the apex of the Delta in the construction of the region’s landscape and identity. Based on this hypothesis, the toponymic classification found in Trismegistos Places and reproduced above in Table 2.1 needs to be modified (Table 2.3).

1 Deltas with an S: What Literary Sources Say

Indeed, an examination of the context in which the toponym ‘Delta’ is used in papyri reveals that it could refer to both a site and an area (that is, to a point and a territory), a fact that is also acknowledged in Greek literary sources. In the passage from his Geography quoted above, Strabo writes: ‘The Nile flows from the Aethiopian boundaries towards the north in a straight line to the district called “Delta”, and then, being “split at the head”, as Plato says, splits into two branches.’Footnote ⁵⁸ The district (χωρίον) in question is mentioned once more a little later in the same paragraph. There, Strabo discusses the polysignificance of the toponym ‘Delta’:

In other words, according to Strabo, in his lifetime, Δέλτα was the Greek name of a village (κώμη), a district (χωρίον) and the whole of Lower Egypt.Footnote ⁶⁰ Strabo’s testimony implies that the district and village got their name in reference to their position at the beginning (ἀρχή) of the Delta. All three Deltas thus refer and are named in explicit reference to the apex, of which they represent concentric, territorial manifestations (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Schematic rendering of Strabo’s three Deltas

Trismegistos Geo does not include an entry on the district Delta, but it does account for the village (TM Geo 4006), which it identifies with the modern island of El Warraq. El Warraq is located in the governorate of Giza, between the mainland districts of Imbaba and Shubra. The biggest island in the Nile, it stands at the point at which the Nile divides itself into two branches (Maps 2.1 and 2.2).Footnote ⁶¹ However, this identification does not fit with what we know of the location of the head of the Nile at the turn of the era. Indeed, recent work has shown that from ca. 3500 BP, the apex of the Delta has been moving northward at a gradual yet steady rate.Footnote ⁶² This means that it was located more to the south in the lifetime of Strabo, perhaps a little bit to the north of Babylon.

Map 2.1 The apex of the Nile Delta, with the island of Warraq

Source: Google Earth

Map 2.2 Slanted view of the apex of the Nile Delta, with the island of Warraq at the forefront

Source: Google Earth

Another, partly overlapping but also sensibly different, trio of deltas is described by second-century CE Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy. The description is part of the fourth book of his Geography (4.5). I provide here a more literal translation in order to highlight the particular meaning of some of the terms used by Ptolemy:

How much of Ptolemy’s embodied experience of the Egyptian landscape made it into this description? And can his insider’s perspective partly explain the distance felt between his description of the Nile Delta and the more authoritative versions provided by Herodotus, Strabo and Diodorus? These three writers did all visit Egypt, and their testimonies are certainly extremely valuable. But they were, literally, outsiders, so their gazes remained fundamentally Helleno- and Romanocentric, self-referential and therefore more panoramic than locally grounded. Ptolemy’s case is different. He was a local, and Egypt is where he wrote his Geography. In order for us to properly assess the full historical value of Ptolemy’s testimony, we therefore ought to acknowledge his Egyptianness. By this I don’t mean that he was a native Egyptian (he seemingly was not), but that he was born and did live in Egypt most if not all of his life.

We know very little about Ptolemy’s life, but what we know matters: A Roman citizen, probably of Greek ancestry, he was born and lived in Egypt, including in Alexandria, where he worked from at least ca. 146 until his death ca. 170 CE.Footnote ⁶⁴ While scholars generally point out the inevitable inaccuracies of the factual content of the Geography, I argue that its Egyptian section does deserve more credit. The discrepancies between Ptolemy’s and earlier descriptions of the region might have to do not only with the time span – and thus environmental shifts – that separate him from his predecessors, but also with Ptolemy’s own biography, including his personal, physical and socio-culturally anchored understanding of the local landscape, a crucial factor which remains unexplored by modern scholarship.

Indeed, Ptolemy’s Nilotic portion of the Geography does offer an insider’s paradigm. First, we have seen how the Greek, geometric approach to the region illustrated by the toponym Delta also manifests itself in literary descriptions of the region’s hydrography. Ptolemy’s account stands out. Not only does he document how the Nile branches had shifted between Strabo’s and his lifetime, but he also layers his work with information that is rooted in local approaches and uses of the Nile, thereby allowing us to refine and nuance earlier outsiders’ testimonies. Thus, he is the first ancient Greek author to systematically distinguish between the Nile branches (which he calls ‘rivers’ following the Egyptian use) and their ‘mouths’ (also following the Egyptian use), whose names are for the most part unaccounted for elsewhere in literary sources (Map 2.3). He is also the only ancient author to specifically mention the existence of transverse canals that allowed boats to sail throughout the Delta in an east–west direction, avoiding the lengthier trip to and from the apex (which is still necessary today).Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘Great River’ (ὁ Μέγας ποταμός), the hydronym which he uses to name the Nile, is the literal translation of the Egyptian hydronym p3 itrw,Footnote ⁶⁶ while the ‘Taly’ branch is attested in a third-century CE documentary papyrus.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, the hydronyms ‘Agathos Daimôn’ and ‘Termouthiac’, which refer to the two branches flowing towards or near Alexandria in the western Delta, can be directly linked to local (and imperially sanctioned) religious practices that are attested at the time in the Alexandrian area.Footnote ⁶⁸

Map 2.3 The hydrography of the Nile Delta according to Ptolemy

The Egyptian section of Book 4 progresses outward in and from north to south. Alexandria, where Ptolemy lived, appears very early on in Book 4, as one of the settlements on the seacoast of Mareota (4.5.1). The entry reads ‘Alexandria, metropolis of all Egypt’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The provincial capital does appear to be the starting point of Book 4. As Ptolemy narrows down on the Nile after having surveyed the province’s maritime and desert edges (including oases), he proceeds with locating the deltas’ branches, then their nomes and metropoleis, before moving southwards to the Heptanomia and Thebaid areas. Ptolemy’s list of Lower Egypt’s nomes and metropoleis (4.5.46–54) therefore follows a north-west (Alexandrian area) to south-east (Babylon and the Wadi Tumilat) fashion.Footnote ⁷⁰ The north-to-south organisation speaks to his Alexandrian vantage point. It also evokes the journey most travellers entering Egypt from Alexandria and wishing to reach Upper Egypt and the harbours on the Red Sea had to embark on. As for the west-to-east arrangement of this portion of Book 4, it is similar to what is attested in Egyptian geographical list texts from the Middle Kingdom to the Roman period.Footnote ⁷¹ This should not be seen as a coincidence, but as yet another testimony of Ptolemy’s knowledge of and engagement with Egyptian modes of space making.Footnote ⁷²

Taking these considerations into account, let’s come back to Ptolemy’s description of the three deltas and reflect on what it tells us about the role of the apex within his construction and experience of Lower Egypt. Ptolemy’s description of Lower Egypt’s three deltas is embedded in a larger section on the Delta, which is, too, divided into three sections: the first one (4.5.39) focuses on the Great Delta, which corresponds to Lower Egypt and is bounded by the Agathos Daimon branch to the west and the Bubastic one to the east. The second one (4.5.40) deals with the branches that flow from the Bubastic (easternmost) branch and bound the Small Delta to the west and the Third Delta to the east. The third and last section (4.5.41) deals with the two branches (Thermouthiac and Taly) that split from the Agathos Daimon branch and flow through the Great Delta. The latter are located in the western half of Lower Egypt (Map 2.4).

Map 2.4 Egypt’s three ‘deltas’ according to PtolemyFootnote ⁸³

The three deltas do not seem to have been of the same status. Indeed, Ptolemy distinguishes between the Great and Small Deltas on the one hand, and the Third Delta on the other. This distinction is expressed through the verbal forms used. Indeed, while the Great and Small Deltas are said to ‘be called’ (καλεῖται) that way, the use of the optative formula λέγοιτο δ’ἃν in the sentence pertaining to the third delta gives the impression that the existence of the third delta was perhaps not as commonly invoked or known. The verbs used by Ptolemy also pose the question: Who calls these deltas by these names? Does Ptolemy have in mind other scholars, the Greek-speaking population of the province at large, or both? It is impossible to tell for sure, but given he wrote these lines in Egypt, it seems quite safe to assume that these toponyms were in use locally during his lifetime.

Ptolemy provides coordinate points (θέσις) for each of the three deltas. Regarding the Great Delta, its location corresponds to ‘the branching of the Delta’ (τῆς ἐκτροπῆς τοῦ ΔέλταFootnote ⁷³) – that is, the point where the Great River, whose western stream is called Agathos Daimon, turns into the Bubastiac river. In other words, this is the apex. As for the location of the Small and Third Deltas, one can only deduce that they correspond to the two points where the Bubastic river splits up (σχίζεται) into two distributaries. If Ptolemy’s locations of the three deltas correspond to bifurcation points, does it mean the term only meant a place (apex) and not a space? The syntax of this passage, and more particularly the use of the adverbial compound καθ’ὅ, which can literally be translated as ‘down which’ or ‘down where’, indicates that the term could mean more than one thing. The three deltas are thus made both by their respective apex, and by the water and land down, that is downstream, from the apex point.

Ptolemy’s mapping of Lower Egypt’s three deltas’ bifurcation points and his polysignificant use of the term Delta are reminiscent of Strabo’s emphatic testimony on the main apex of the Delta (Map 2.3). Yet he also complicates this general description by attesting to two other ‘deltas’, a ‘small’ one and a ‘third’ one, both of which are encompassed within the Great Delta. Overall, Ptolemy’s three deltas document a local understanding of the deltaic hydrography that is the product of his multifaceted cultural and environmental sensibility: While his use of the toponym Delta builds on the Greek tradition, he also acknowledges local toponymy by specifying that ‘what is round about these rivers [the branches of the Nile] is commonly called Katō Xōra’.Footnote ⁷⁴ His focus on the course of the river, the north-to-south and west-to-east organisation of the Nile Delta section and his emphasis on the splitting points of the river’s channels all make sense on the ground – that is, from the perspective of someone who lives in Alexandria and has travelled through Lower Egypt. We might therefore wonder whether, when he writes that the Great and then Small Delta ‘is called’ (καλείται) this way, and that there is a ‘third Delta’ (τρίτον Δέλτα) ‘as we call it’ (πως τῶν εἰρημένων), he is referring to particular territories and their names as they were known locally.

The Small and Third Deltas are both located in the eastern half of the region.Footnote ⁷⁵ Why is that so? We know that the subsidence rate of the north-eastern Delta was faster than that of the north-western and north-central Delta during the mid- to upper Holocene.Footnote ⁷⁶ Was the western half conceptualised in Ptolemy’s day as a greater extension of the Alexandrian region? If so, could this partly explain the names of the Agathos Daimon and Thermouthiac branches? Was the eastern part of the Delta seen as a somewhat distinctive region by locals, that is beyond Ptolemy’s scholarly network?

A similar bipartite conceptualisation of Lower Egypt appears in Book 4 of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. There, the Alexandria-born novelist, who was a contemporary of Ptolemy, provides the following description of the region’s fluvial landscape:

Nikos Litinas compellingly reconstructed and analysed the Greek text of this passage, thereby proposing the revised translation above. According to his analysis, while Tatius’ novel draws from older descriptions of the Nile (notably Herodotus), ‘when he came to the description of the divisions within the Delta, he updated and modified some specific details using current information and experience’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Like Ptolemy’s, Achilles Tatius’ description of the Delta’s hydrography agrees with Egyptian evidence. Indeed, as François Ghiringhelli’s work shows, among the several waterways known to have made up the region under the Ramessides, one can distinguish three main branches. The deltaic hydronyms attested in Egyptian texts could also have been used at times to designate the three main branches’ watershed basins. These consisted respectively of the western Delta, the eastern Delta and the central Delta. This tripartite description of the region’s hydrographic profile correlates with the geographical organisation of the nomes in Egyptian geographical lists into three main sequences (a western, a central and an eastern one).Footnote ⁷⁹

Greek texts concur with Egyptian sources on another crucial point: The anchoring, structuring role of the apex area.Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, similarly to Herodotus and Strabo before him, Achilles Tatius mentions the existence of a settlement at the apex of Lower Egypt. Litinas’ restored text replaces the otherwise unattested ‘Kerkasore’ (Κερκάσωρος) found in other editions with the more locally anchored Σύρων, a village located in the Heliopolitan nome that is attested in a first-century CE papyrus.Footnote ⁸¹ The village of Syrōn would therefore have been located downstream from Memphis, slightly below a ‘winding’ or ‘horn’ of the Nile,Footnote ⁸² a topographical feature that is reminiscent of the area of the island of Warraq, discussed above. It is then to say that Syrōn would have been located close to the ‘Delta’ village mentioned by Strabo (see Plate 1). Could these have been two designations for the same settlement? It’s impossible to tell. If they were not, then they were located close to each other, and within a ca.10–12 km radius of Babylon and Heliopolis.

Achilles Tatius’ description of the Nile Delta’s hydrography also agrees with Ptolemy in that it too conveys the idea that Lower Egypt encompasses more than one delta (Map 2.4; Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Schematic rendering of Egypt’s ‘shapes of deltas’ according to Achilles Tatius

In this particular passage, the toponym Delta is not a synonym of Lower Egypt (though Achilles Tatius uses it with that meaning earlier on; see 3.24). Rather, it is employed in a metaphorical way, to describe how the middle branch of the Nile, by flowing all the way through the sea (καὶ τὴν γῆν εἰς τὰ σχίσματα Δέλτα ποιῶν), acts as a bisector that shapes Lower Egypt into two triangles. This branch is described as the main branch of the river. In other words, it is the Nile itself, and not one of its distributaries, that shapes the land into two triangles. The apex’s role is thus, by the same token, doubled.

The analysis provided in this section shows how ancient Greek and Roman literary renditions of Lower Egypt into more than one (type of) delta drew more than has traditionally been assumed from Egyptian traditions and perspectives. This is especially true of Egypt-based writers like Ptolemy and Achilles Tatius. Documentary evidence illuminates such local influences in different, at times mundane, yet powerful ways.

2 Deltas with an S: What Documentary Evidence Says

Literary testimonies on the polysignificance of the toponym Delta both illuminate and find some confirmation in papyri. That a district or settlement called Delta existed at the apex before the Roman period is documented in P.Rev. (259–258 BCE), a papyrus containing revenue laws under the reign of Ptolemy II. The toponym is listed in the thirty-first paragraph, which is dedicated to the fines that cultivators who did not pay the tax on wine and orchards faced. It appears in the middle of a series of nomes located respectively in the western and eastern parts of the Delta:

The paragraph indicates that there were three different fines, each applicable in one of four geographical zones: Libya and the western Delta (4–6); the central and eastern Delta (7–10); Middle Egypt and the Fayyum (10–13); and Upper Egypt (14). The order of the nomes, the parting of Lower Egypt into two different fine zones and the combination of Middle Egypt (that is, Heptanomia) with the western half of the Delta are all in line with the way in which the region is traditionally organised in Egyptian lists of nomes. It is also, as we’ve discussed above, in agreement with Ptolemy’s list, which dates from almost half a millennium later.

Most of the toponyms listed are nomes. We also find Libya, and the Lake District, which corresponds to the Fayyum – that is, the future Arsinoite Nome. The two settlements listed in the passage above – Bubastos and Memphis – are named in tandem with the nome for which they are the metropolis. This is not the case of the Delta, so we should securely expect that it designates a region or a nome. A comparison with the other, similarly structured, but slightly different, list of nomes contained in P.Rev. (par. 60–72) also goes in that direction. While the list quoted above is largely enumerative, the second one consists in a nome-by-nome detailing of the laws on the farming of taxes on sesame and ricin. The Delta is absent; we do, however, find the Heliopolite nome (par. 64). In his introduction to the first edition of the papyrus, John P. Mahaffy, citing Strabo, suggests that Delta was another term used to designate the Heliopolitan nome. Strabo does indeed list a series of nomes, but not the Heliopolitan one, and we have seen above how he mentions the existence of a Delta district located at the apex. Mahaffy’s hypothesis has gathered a considerable amount of support.Footnote ⁸⁵ A double designation – in this case a topographical metonymy (Delta) and a sacred toponym (Heliopolis) – is certainly possible.

The Delta Nome is the last one listed in the section that is otherwise dedicated to nomes located on the western part of Lower Egypt. Now the Heliopolitan nome is traditionally described by scholars as being located on the eastern shore of the Nile. Why then include it in this section and not in the following one? Did the Heliopolitan nome of the time encompass territory situated on both sides of the Nile? Could it thus be listed in this way because the apex was directly linked to Alexandria via the Canopic branch, and at the crossroads between the western Delta, the Nile Valley and the roads leading to the eastern desert?

Papyri also confirm the historicity of a settlement called Delta located in the apex area. A reference to the settlement of Delta is found in a second-century CE hymn to Isis (P.Oxy. 11 1380).Footnote ⁸⁶ There, amidst a long enumeration of deltaic settlements with their respective epithet to the goddess, we read: ‘at Delta, Giver of delights’.Footnote ⁸⁷

In their note on this particular line, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt argue that ‘Delta’ refers probably to ‘a town rather than a district’ and corresponds to Strabo’s ‘κώμη rather than the χωρίον or was further north, as suggested by HogarthFootnote ⁸⁸ …, or meant the Heliopolite nome’. Given that none of the Egyptian toponyms associated with an Isiac epithet in P.Oxy. 11 1380 corresponds to a nome, it seems most likely indeed that Delta was the same ‘village’ mentioned by Strabo. In another study, I suggest that this particular hymn to Isis is the third of three successive versions (an Egyptian, a Graeco-Macedonian and a Roman), the second and third ones consisting of geographical updates and the expansion of a pre-Hellenistic Egyptian original. Should that be the case, the section in which Delta is found would originate from before the Roman period. This is in line with Strabo’s testimony, which dates from the early days of the Roman occupation of Egypt, and thus implies the prior existence of the district and settlement named Delta by Greek speakers. The inclusion of Delta into the list also indicates that the settlement of Delta was not a small village, but a settlement of considerable enough size.

We’ve seen how TM Geo putatively locates Delta on the island of El Warraq. Could it have been the site of a commercial harbour? This seems most probable considering the strategic and practical importance of locating a settlement at the apex. Given the polysignificance of the toponym, the time is ripe to reconsider the meaning of Delta in documentary papyri.

Four of the papyri that belong to the third-century BCE archive of Zenon contain the toponym Delta. Two of those are very similar accounts of expenses incurred during what seems, according to references to a captain, to be a voyage along the Nile. Line 23 of P.Cair.Zen. 4 59705 reads ‘upon the Delta’ (ἐπὶ τοῦ Δέλτα̣) and is followed by a list of expenses (mostly food, wood and bath fees). Delta appears twice in SB 4 7451, a longer expense list written on wax tablets. It is first associated with debts (only wine is preserved) made in ‘the Delta’ (τοῦ Δέλτα).Footnote ⁸⁹ The second (tablet 70b) is written in a different hand. It consists of a heading followed by expenses similar to those found in P.Cair.Zen. 4 59705. Just before the heading, we find a two-line entry related to a meal eaten in Memphis. This might indicate that the boat sailed to Memphis, then downstream towards Delta.Footnote ⁹⁰ A similar heading is found in P.Cair.Zen. 1 59090, an account of money received by Zenodoros, Zenon’s treasurer, through a man called Peisicles.Footnote ⁹¹ The fourth document is P.Cair.Zen. 2 59470, a business letter from a travelling merchant named Molossos to Zenon that was written between 256 and 246 BCE. Towards the end of the letter, Molossos informs Zenon that he sent him a letter ‘regarding the papyrus rolls’ through a man named Kriton, whom he had met ‘upon the Delta’ (ἐπὶ τοῦ Δέλτα). I’ve discussed this document elsewhere, and hypothesised that the order of papyrus rolls was most probably made in the eastern Delta.Footnote ⁹² Here, too, Delta might very well refer to the settlement of that name located at, or else the wider area of, the apex.

Let’s finally look back at P.Mich. 8 467, the second-century CE letter that belonged to the bilingual (Greek and Latin) archive of Claudius Tiberianus, which we discussed earlier. While the reference to ‘Delta’ found in this papyrus has so far been understood as referring to Lower Egypt at large, the present study refines our understanding of which delta Terentianus had in mind. Indeed, one might think that by asking Tiberianus to go ‘to(wards)/next to Delta’ (ad Delta) to buy him three breeders, he might not have meant the Delta as a whole, but more specifically the settlement or area of Delta, wherefrom fluvial traffic towards Alexandria, along the Canopic branch of the Nile, would have been easy.

All five documents discussed in this section mention Delta as the site of some business transactions. In all cases, these take place in the context of connectivity networks between the Fayyum oasis and Lower Egypt. I therefore suggest that in the Hellenistic and Roman period, the settlement of Delta was the site of a commercial harbour whose attractiveness resided in its location at the crossroads between the Fayyum, the western Delta, the eastern Delta and the desert and the Nile Valley. Its situation and role would have been comparable to that of Bulaq, another settlement located close to the apex. Bulaq developed in the thirteenth century CE following a westward shift of the Nile in the area.Footnote ⁹³ Starting from the fifteenth and until the early twentieth century CE, it was Cairo’s main fluvial harbour. Seen in this light, the transactions and request for purchases set in Delta found in several papyri could be located in a specific place, rather than in a vague space. Given the particular contexts of these documents, this would make more sense.

Lastly, papyri also document how the divide of Lower Egypt into two halves located on each side of a distributary of the Nile found its way into administrative geography. Indeed, between 314/315 and 322 CE, Lower Egypt was split into two provinces (and dioceses): Aegyptus Jovia (Western Delta) and Aegyptus Herculia (Eastern Delta and Heptanomia). There, the Phathmetic branch probably acted as the border between the two provinces. The same branch was used again from 381 CE on as the border between the provinces and dioceses of Aegyptus (Western Delta) and Augustamnica (Eastern Delta and, until 535, Heptanomia).Footnote ⁹⁴ We find the same logic in maps based on the tenth-century scholar Ibn Ḥawqal’s work, The Face of the Earth.Footnote ⁹⁵ Ibn Ḥawqal travelled to Egypt in 955 CE. In his maps, Lower Egypt (which he calls Maṣr (el-souflah) elsewhere) is split into two longitudinal zones: الريف (al-rif),’the countryside’ to the west, and الجوف (al-gouf),’the hollow’, in the east.Footnote ⁹⁶ The name of the western half of Lower Egypt might be a translation of the Greek chōra, which was used to refer to the wider agricultural region around Alexandria, and also at times to Egypt as a whole.Footnote ⁹⁷ As for the name of the eastern half of Lower Egypt, it might be yet another expression of the toponymic manifestations of the lower elevation of this region.

In addition to being the (literal and conceptual) root of a variety of deltas, the apex area has been from very early on and consistently through history the host of a concatenation of settlements, all of which ebbed and flowed with the apex point itself. These developments, whose archaeological remains can be traced back to the Predynastic period, are a testimony to the navel-like status of this juncture point between not only the Nile Valley and Delta, but also more far-reaching roads and routes that linked the Mediterranean, the Fayyum, the eastern desert, the Red Sea and the Nilotic hydrography.

Sources from Late Antiquity and the Arab period indicate that the polysemy associated with the Greek toponym Delta finds Egyptian and Arabic parallels. Other metonymic associations between settlements located close to the Delta’s apex and a larger territory are known in later periods. These involve two other toponyms: Kēme and Maṣr.

3 The Apex as Synecdoche: Kēme and Maṣr

The selection of a site located close to the military settlement of BabylonFootnote ⁹⁸ by the Arabs for their first Egyptian foundation represents a powerful expression of not only the strategic location of the apex of the Delta, but also the recognition, by the new rulers of Egypt, of the legitimacy of an urban tradition that goes back thousands of years.Footnote ⁹⁹ This is visible, as for earlier periods, in toponymic practices. Indeed, ⲕⲏⲙⲉ (Sahidic) or ⲭⲏⲙⲓ (Bohairic), the Coptic toponym used to refer to the Delta, also designated a series of settlements which had been at some point capitals of Lower Egypt (Memphis, Babylon, Fusṭāṭ), as well as Egypt as a whole.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The toponym is the later form of the ancient Egyptian km.t, literally ‘Black Land’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ which referred to the alluvial soil of the Nile Valley and Delta, in contrast with dšrt, the red land of the desert.

Similarly, the Arabic toponym مصر (Maṣr) which is now Egypt’s Arabic name started as a metonymic toponym that pertained to a military settlement located in the area of Babylon-Fusṭāṭ.Footnote ¹⁰² This association is not attested in Arabic papyri. The toponym does not appear in Arabic papyri, but we find it with seemingly two meanings in the seventh-century Chronicle of John of Nikiu. First, he locates the journey of Arab troops during the invasion of Egypt along ‘the great river of Egypt’.Footnote ¹⁰³ According to Amélineau, the term ምስር (Məsərə), which is a transliteration of the Arabic Maṣr, actually refers to the Delta.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, Maqrizi, al Idrisi, Ibn Ḥawqal and maps based on some of these scholars’ works routinely differentiate between (asafil arḍ) Maṣr or Maṣr (elsouflah), literally ‘Lower Egypt’, and (الاعلى) صعيد, alSa’id (al-a’la)), ‘The High Sa’id’, that is the Nile Valley. The latter expression, which is also at times associated with Maṣr, is a tautology, for alSa’id means ‘that which goes up’, and al-a’la ‘high’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Second, John of Nikiu also mentions ‘The gates of Maṣr’ (25), no doubt referring to the gates of Babylon or Fusṭāṭ.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The same use of Maṣr to refer to the Cairo area is found in Ibn Battuta,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and it endures today.