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أسيوط (,Asyūṭ)

أسيوط (,Asyūṭ), formerly known as Sʒwty (Zawty),1, Siâut2, Λυκούπολις (Lykoúpolis and Lykopolis), Lycopolis, Assiout and Asyut, is located on the left bank of the an-Nil (Nile) just upstream of a bend in the river. The city today has a population exceeding 400 thousand.3 Remains from the ancient city's necropolis include tombs of three officials, two of which were called Khety. Classical Greeks paid more attention to the dog and wolf mummies, hence their name for the city. Ancient gods included Wepwawet, Anubis and Hereret.4 Around the beginning of this century the Virgin Mary is believed by Coptic Christians to have appeared here.

YearPopulationPolitical entity
1800 BCE56Km.t (Kemet or Egypt)
1800 CE25,0007Égypte (Egypt), part of France
1900 CE42,0007Egypt, which was occupied by the UK

External references

Tomb IV of Khety II, near Asyūt

Historical maps

map showing part of Km.t (Kemet or Egypt) 1800 BCE

map showing parts of Km.t (Kemet or Egypt) and ḥʒḳw-ḫḳswt (Hyksos state) 1600 BCE

map showing part of Km.t (Kemet or Egypt) 1360 to 650 BCE

map showing part of the Persian Malkate 430 BCE

map showing part of the Ptolemaïkè Basileía (Ptolemaic Egypt) 200 BCE

map showing part of Senatvs Popvlvsqve Romanvs (the Roman Empire) 100 CE

map showing part of Rhomania (Romania or the Byzantine Empire) 361 to 500 CE

map showing part of Ĕrānshahr (Sassianian Empire) 622 CE

map showing part of al-Khilafah al-'Abbasiyyah al-Islamiyyah (Abbasid Empire) 800 CE

map showing part of Miṣr (Tulunid Egypt) 900 CE

map showing part of al-Fāṭimiyyūn (Fatimid Empire) 1000 to 1100 CE

map showing part of the Sultanate of Miṣr and Sūriyya (Ayyubid Empire) 1200 CE

map showing part of the Sulṭanat al-Māmalīk (Mamluk Empire) 1300 to 1500 CE

map showing part of the Devlet-i Âliye-yi Osmâniyye (Ottoman Empire) 1600 to 1700 CE

map showing part of Égypte (Egypt), which was part of France, 1800 CE

map showing part of Egypt, which was occupied by the UK, 1900 CE

map showing eastern Miṣr, 2000 CE

Footnotes

1. The vowels are conventional among Egyptologists but are not intended to represent the vowel sounds of the times.
2. Spelling taken from Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (3rd ed., Penguin Books, 1992). I interpreted this to be Aramaic Samekh-Aleph-Taw for purposes of the glyph on the map.
3. Calculation for 2012 in world-gazetteer.com, accessed January 28, 2012.
4. Donald B. Spanel, "Asyut", in Donald B. Redford, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Vol. I (Oxford Unversity Press, 2001).
5. I'm guessing that Chandler is using the Cambridge Ancient History's dating, in which case 1800 BCE falls within the 12th Dynasty (1991 to 1786 BCE). Others date that dynasty's start from 2155 (Mellaar) to 1979 BCE (Bernal). See Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 2nd ed. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987) and Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Volume II (Rutgers University Press, 1991).
6. According to Chandler, ibid., "Tables of World's Largest Cities: 1800 B.C.", Sʒwty was smaller than Nn(w)-nswt (Heracleopolis), which was smaller than Kerma, which was smaller than Susa, which had an estimated 25 thousand residents. It was larger than Mohenjo-daro, which had an estimated 20 thousand residents. It was the ninth largest city in the world in 1800 BCE.
7. Chandler, ibid., "Tables of the World's Largest Cities."
8. World-gazetteer.com, accessed 6/2/2012.