City
Tigubis
Listen to the story
Tigubis, a town in Upper Mesopotamia, is usually placed at es Sihl, near the eighth well out from Harran, and the geographer Ptolemy lists it too. Here a road branches off towards a spring, and along it the name comes back as Atigubbi, beside 'ad fontem', meaning 'at the spring', with the spring's own name spelt differently again. The figure sixteen, about twenty-four kilometres, sits oddly beneath the town and probably belongs to the stretch towards Hadia. The mapmaker was squeezing names and numbers between rivers here, clumsily but with remarkable care.