ABSTRACT
The name of Ombo or Ombos is taken from the Greek form of the Egyptian Nbi or Nubi through the Coptic Embo. At one time this village was identified as the site of the Ombos of Juvenal’s Satires, where the poet describes a battle between the inhabitants of Ombos and the inhabitants of Tentyra (Dendera). “A long-standing and ancient grudge, an undying hatred, and a wound that can never be healed, still rages between the neighbours, Ombos and Tentyra. On both sides there is the utmost fury on the part of the vulgar, from this cause, that each locality hates its neighbour’s deities, since it thinks those alone should be accounted gods whom it worships itself,” [Here follows a long description of the fight with sticks and stones.] “Those who inhabit Tentyra press on (their opponents), all showing their backs in rapid flight. One who through excessive fear was precipitating his pace falls and is captured ; whereupon the victorious crowd, after he had been cut into a number of morsels and small portions, that one dead man might suffice for many, eats up the whole of him and gnaws his very bones. … The very last of them who came up after the entire body had been consumed, drew his fingers along the ground and tasted some of the blood” (Satire XV 11. 33–92). Internecine struggles between villages, although not ferocious as in Roman times, are still a feature of life in the country parts of Egypt. Strabo also notes the hatred of the people of Dendera towards the sacred animal of Kom Ombo: “Tentyra, where the crocodile is held in peculiar abhorrence, and is regarded as the most odious of all animals. Other Egyptians, though acquainted with its mischievous disposition and hostility towards mankind, yet worship it and abstain from harming it. But the people of Tentyra track and destroy it in every way. … The people of Tentyra have a dislike to crocodiles, yet suffer no injury from them, but dive and cross the river when no other person ventures to do so.”
