TERENUTHIS
(Kom Abou Bellou) Egypt.
An artificial mound near El Tarana, a village 110 km SE
of Alexandria on the edge of the Libyan Desert. Near
Lake Maryut a stela, now in Cairo Museum, was found.
It dates from ca. 1085 B.C. and describes a gift of land
to Hathor of Terenuthis by a caravan leader and a chief
of Libya. In El Tarana there used to be a ruined Ptolemaic temple with blocks bearing the names of Ptolemy I
Soter, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, and Penamun. Undoubtedly, owing to its situation at the head of the caravan
road between Egypt and Libya, Terenuthis became prosperous, as the finds from her necropolis indicate. By far the most important among these finds are limestone grave stelae, belonging mostly to the first half of the 3d c. A.D.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
C. Bonner, “The Ship of the Soul on a
Group of Grave Stelae from Terenuthis,”
ProcPhilSoc
85 (1941) 84-91; Z. Ali, “Some funerary Stelae from
Kom Abou Bellou,”
BSRAA 38 (1949) 55-88; 40 (1953)
1-50; J. Schwartz, “Les Stéles de Terenouthis et Ia mort
d'Alexandre Severe,”
Chronique d'Égypte 30 (1955)
124-26; S. Farid, “Preliminary Report on the Excavations of the Antiquities Department at Kom Abu-Billo,”
ASAE 61 (1973) 21-26.
S. SHENOUDA
