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Ansena
Antinopolis
Ansena, Antinopolis was a
city founded at an older Egyptian village by the
Roman emperor
Hadrian to commemorate
his deified young beloved,
Antinous, on the east
bank of the Nile, not
far from the site in Upper
Egypt where Antinous
drowned in 130 A.D.
Antinopolis was a little
to the south of the Egyptian
village of Besa named after the goddess and oracle
of Besa, which was consulted occasionally even as
late as the age of Constantine
I.
Antinopolis was built at
the foot of the hill upon which Besa was seated. The
city is located nearly opposite of
Hermopolis Magna.
The earliest finds at the site date to the
New Kingdom, when
Bes and
Hathor were important deities (ref.
Princeton). A grotto, once inhabited by
Christian anchorites, probably
marks the seat of the shrine and oracle, and
Grecian tombs with inscriptions
point to the necropolis of Antonopoulos.
The ruins of Antonopoulos attest, by the area which they fill, the
ancient grandeur of the city. The direction of the principal streets
may still be traced. One at least of them, which ran from north to
south, had on either side of it a corridor supported by columns for
the convenience of foot-passengers. The walls of the theatre near
the southern gate, and those of the hippodrome without the walls to
the east, are still extant. At the north-western extremity of the
city was a portico, of which four columns remain, inscribed to Good
Fortune, and bearing the date of the 14th and last year of the reign
of Alexander Severus,
235.
As far as can be ascertained from the
space covered with mounds of masonry, Antonopoulos was about a mile
and a half in length, and nearly half a mile broad. Near the
Hippodrome are a well and tanks appertaining to an ancient road,
which leads from the eastern gate to a valley behind the town.
At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, when Napoleonic surveys were
made, a theater, many temples, a triumphal arch, two streets with
double colonnades, illustrated in Description
de l'Egypte, a circus, and a hippodrome nearby were still to
be seen.
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