Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Qau el-Kebir, called Tjebu in ancient Egyptian and Antaeopolis in Greek, was a village in Middle Egypt and the capital of the 10^th Upper Egyptian nome. The main deity of the town was Nemtywy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, substantial parts of a Ptolemaic temple were still preserved, but they were destroyed by a change of the Nile ’ s streambed. The cemeteries in the deserts east of the town include tombs of almost all periods of Egyptian history beginning from the Badarian Period. Those of the First Intermediate Period are especially well equipped and are an important source for burial customs of that period in a provincial town. The three large, rock-cut tombs of Middle Kingdom governors belong to the biggest private tombs built in the Middle Kingdom. However, because of the destruction of the tombs, the dating and sequence of the governors during the 12^th Dynasty remains problematic. In the New Kingdom, the tomb of the governor May equipped with a sarcophagus and datable to Thutmose III was built. Several New Kingdom hippopotami bone deposits are perhaps connected with the cult of Nemtywy and Seth. The Ptolemaic temple dates to Ptolemy VI. Its pronaos with 3 x 6 columns is known from depictions in the Description de l ’ Égypte.