Road station

Diospoli quae Tibe

Karnak · Luxor

Diospolis Magna, the great city of Zeus, carries a note on the map, which is Thebes, echoing Strabo and Pliny, who explained that Diospolis and Thebes were one and the same place, at Karnak and Luxor. Unusually, the road line turns here and runs straight through the first letter of that note. Nothing in the entry hints at the city's old standing as the administrative and religious centre of pharaonic Egypt: under the Ptolemies it lost favour to Memphis and Heliopolis, rose in revolt again and again, and was largely destroyed in 86 BC, never to recover.

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