If one were to so travel in the night, what would one say upon finding the most ancient of them all? What thoughts, what thoughts, would one have, there in the impossible distance?
Defining a city: See Joshua J. Mark (2014) "The Ancient City" Ancient City Encyclopedia.
Place-names are tell-tales. They are hints, if not signs. Signs of a past life which we can decode only archaeologically -- and perhaps genealogically, so to speak -- if there's been too much passage of time (if time has had too much passage, that is, because we arrive on the scene too late or too lackluster or quite lackadaisically). We remember too little day-to-day, as it is.
Place-names are signatures, afterglows, of those who have lived -- and who lived -- there, when/where that place got its name. Or perhaps thereafter, in which case they lacked the mandate, the power -- or merely a good reason -- to change it. The vernacular of the history of places is thus that (is a slant symptomatic of the hard-driving hand) of those who do or who control the writing. There are places we cannot go back to, but which are us -- in the spirit(ual) sphere.
That ancient place, Payom -- which is nowadays known as Faiyoum or Fayoum -- is one such place. It was come upon as the long-winded Nile reached near the end of its journey and approached its own mouth. Indeed, all are agreed that Payom was and is the Nile's own creation (following an epic rainfall season in the Great Lakes region and Ethiopia far, far upstream; and that it is the dwellers who first settled there so long ago that gave it its lasting name, in their own language.
Ancient Egyptians, to whom their god Thoth (sometimes called Atum) had gifted the art of writing, heard the Nilotic word Payom and faithfully inscribed it in their hieroglyphic record as pꜣym. Incidentally, linguistic experts have affirmed that ancient Egyptians did not use any vowels (that is, a, e, i, o or u) in their written texts. In at least some Nilotic languages, the word thoth means plentiful (or a plenitude). On the other hand, the roots of the word Atum are tim, timo or (among Kenya's jo-Ugenya even now) tum -- all of which reference the English word do, or the act of "doing". As a name, therefore, Atum is an epithet, an endearing a meme, attached to one who has proven in practical ways to be a doer of no mean achievement.
Read: From Payom to Faiyoum
In a Nilotic language I know and well-enough speak, pa is, in some places now (but not in all) an archaic word for "place" or "place of". Yom has resisted all spatial and temporal pressures to turn archaic, and remains a word for soft, as in a baby's face, or soft earth. Payom means soft earth or marshland, or a swampy place. Sometimes Pa means place of, as in Pakwach (place of leopards, or leopard's lair); or "people of", as in Padhola. There is indeed another place called Payom nowadays, much farther south in South Sudan: See Map
For lexical reasons, it seems obvious, Pa has often flipped and become Pu, as in Pubungu (place of trees and/or thick undergrowth). In such a place, predators may lurk; and from it they may attack the unwary both slyly and at will. Adults teach the children to move with extreme caution thereabouts. In northern Uganda, far more so than in Kenya's and Tanzania's lake-regions, all these Pa and Pu prefixes (so to speak) continue to be components of living and robust Nilotic languages.
READ: Fayum Towns and their Papyri
READ: Faiyum Artifacts
READ: Kom El Hammam
#Payom #PayomCity
REFERENCES
--Clark, J. Desmond, Ed. (2014) The Cambridge History of Africa. Volume 1: From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
--Egypt's Mysterious Book of the Fayum
--Mark, Joshua J. (2014) "The Ancient City" Ancient City Encyclopedia.
--Wilkinson, Toby ( ) The Nile: Down River Through Egypt's Past and Present. Amazon.com (Find by googling Payom)
