Toponymy on the Periphery: Placenames of the Eastern Desert, Red Sea, and South Sinai in Egyptian Documents from the Early Dynastic until the End of the New Kingdom.

• Author: Rendsburg, Gary A.

Toponymy on the Periphery: Placenames of the Eastern Desert, Red Sea, and South Sinai in Egyptian Documents from the Early Dynastic until the End of the New Kingdom. By JULIEN CHARLES COOPER. Probleme der Agyptologie, vol. 39. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. xvii + 718. $324.

"Egypt is the gift of the Nile," states Herodotus in his famous, perhaps overused, but ever-so-true (and paraphrased) comment. Moreover, Egypt is the one country or region in the ancient Near East which is most easily geographically defined: the Nile Valley, from the Delta in the north to Elephantine in the south. Furthermore, it was the most topographically insulated: deserts to the east and west, the cataracts to the south of Aswan, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. All of this provided Egypt with a relative stability, homogeneity, and even isolation unlike any other civilization in the region. All one has to do is to attempt to teach one's students the boundaries of Canaan (how far north does it reach? does it include the Trans-Jordan?), or have them learn the names of all the peoples who populated Mesopotamia (Kassites anyone?), and the point is well taken.

For about two millennia, notwithstanding the transitions from one dynasty to another, or even the larger transitions from Old Kingdom to First Intermediate Period to Middle Kingdom to Second Intermediate Period, Egypt remained, well, Egypt. Not even the singular exception of the Hyksos invasion and their rule as the Fifteenth Dynasty (ca. 1650-1550 BCE) truly changes this picture, since even the Hyksos used Egyptian royal titulary, carved inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and so on.

The Egyptians knew of peoples beyond their boundaries, but mainly they--or rather their lands--were to be exploited for precious commodities: gold, ebony, and ivory from Nubia, gold from the eastern desert, exotica from Punt, turquoise from western Sinai, and so on. Eventually, of course, the Egyptians established an empire, especially in the direction of Canaan during the New Kingdom period. This imperial venture has been well studied by scholars, especially since the archaeology of the land of Canaan has yielded important evidence, both Egyptian and Canaanite (I use this latter term in the broadest sense), both material culture and written remains.

But in general such studies (apart from some very specific ones) have not been forthcoming from Egyptologists regarding the peripheral areas mentioned above. And the reason is clear, of course: there simply is so little evidence. Serabit el-Khadem in the western Sinai is so special because it is, well, exceptional. One simply does not find much evidence for Egyptian activity in the Sinai peninsula (apart from its northern Mediterranean coast, well fortified by the Egyptian military). Similarly, the Kanais temple built by Seti I in the Eastern Desert attracts attention because, once again, it too is rather exceptional.

Into this picture steps Julien Charles Cooper with his new book, Toponymy on the Periphery, based on his Macquarie University doctoral dissertation of the same title (2015). The goal is to collect, analyze, and classify the toponyms of the three peripheral regions announced in the title, a goal which, I am happy to report, the author attains in excellent fashion.

All told, there are 153 individual toponyms, categorized as follows: eight generic terms ("hill country," "eastern desert," "land of the Shasu," etc.); seventy-seven toponyms that occur in an array of Egyptian texts (funerary, expedition, administrative, etc.); forty-eight terms that occur only in execration texts and topographical...