Introduction

During the first several centuries ad, Egypt, like much of the Mediterranean world, witnessed the large-scale conversion of its population to Christianity. That conversion process took place in a landscape that was still physically dominated by pagan religious monuments - the massive temples, tombs and cemeteries of the Pharaonic and Greco-Roman periods.¹ These monuments, together with their associated inscriptions and reliefs, were conceived by their creators as lieux de memoire in the most fundamental sense, as Jan Assmann has noted, and many served in that capacity for centuries, if not millennia.² Although archaeological excavations have begun to show the range of physical transformations these monuments underwent during Egypt's conversion to Christianity, less attention has been paid to how that conversion process transformed the country's mental landscapes and altered the role of the ancient temples and tombs as loci of cultural memory.³ The following discussion addresses this question by examining the use of pagan monuments as landmarks in the city of Hermopolis Magna during Late Antiquity.

At the most basic level, toponyms give cognitive shape to the physical landscape, differentiating this street from that street, the hill here from the hill over there, and they provide the people who experience a landscape with a mutually-comprehensible means of describing their experience.⁵ However, toponyms also have the potential to serve as loci of cultural memory, to fix in the landscape events of the past and people or places long since vanished, and examples like Alexander the Great's eponymous metropoleis and Hadrian's foundation of Antinoopolis in the name of his drowned favourite, Antinous, demonstrate that the ancients were well aware of this possibility.⁶ Because of their commemorative function, toponyms may become contested in times of social change, being abandoned, altered, or otherwise manipulated according to shifts in the dominant social order; shifting patterns of toponymy may thus serve as an index of broader social change.⁷ In Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, the names of streets, districts, and other public spaces often made reference to traditional religious monuments, from the great temples of the Pharaonic and Ptolemaic periods to the later shrines of Greek, Roman and Egyptian deities.⁸ By Late Antiquity, the same pagan monuments in many cases still dominated village and city skylines, and some of them were still being used as points of reference. However, they had been joined - or, in some cases, physically supplanted - by a host of new monuments, including Christian churches and monasteries.