Road station

Subasto

Tell Basṭa bei Zaqāzīk

Subasto has almost vanished from the parchment: the ink is so faded that the reading rests on the printed editions of 1598 and 1753, and whether the copyist turned a B into an S can no longer be checked. The name stands alone, with no road, and probably means Bubastis, the city at Tell Basta in the south-eastern Nile delta, now partly built over by Zagazig. Its Egyptian name, Per-Bastet, comes from the goddess Bastet, whose chief sanctuary the Greek historian Herodotus places here; under the Libyan kings of the 22nd dynasty the city reached its height.

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