Here is a look at the layout of the complex of the Luxor Temple, or Ipet Resyt as it was in ancient Egyptian, on the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt.
Albeit Ipet Resyt is generally given as spelling ‘southern sanctuary,’ I feel that the proper interpretation of the name would actually be ‘Sanctuary of Ipet.’
Ipet, or Opet or Ipy, was an Egyptian goddess that was considered a protector of the Pharaoh himself as well as mother of Osiris in the local (Theban) theology.
According to ancient historians, as well as mythology, the Thebes (Thebai) in Boeotia (central nowadays Greece) gained their name from their Phoenician founder Cadmus in honour of his father, King Agenor of Tyre, out of the respective major city of Thebes on the Nile in ancient Upper Egypt, which the latter used to be a former ruler (Pharaoh) of.
In order to distinguish them, they were more precisely referred to as ‘seven-gated’ and ‘hundred-gated’ respectively and so they appear as early as Homer’s ‘Iliad’ for that matter.
All the same, King Agenor was more precisely an Egyptian, just as his wife and queen Telephassa, which by implication essentially renders Cadmus as such. But there was a fine line between Egypt and Phoenicia as the two considerably overlapped along the age of the second millennium BC.
The genuine Egyptian name for the Thebes of the Nile, Upper Egypt, was ‘Waset’ that breaks down as ‘Was-et’ spelling ‘City (-et) of the Was (the Sceptre of Pharaohs),’ an appellation that presents a semitic structure, since the city served as the capital of unified (or earlier of Upper) Egypt for long spells during the Middle and New Kindgom.
On the other hand, the name ‘Thebes’ probably comes from an earlier form of much later demotic Egyptian ‘tꜣ jpt,’ or even ‘tꜣ jpy,’ that was likely pronounced as ‘Ta(w)`jpet,’ and reads ‘Land/Place of the Temple.’ The sequence of ‘jpt/y’ stressed in the second component of the name effects a sound similar to ‘-be’ I should add here.
And I allude to the latter since ‘Θήβαι (Thebai/Thebes),’ which actually didn’t share the exact same location as modern Theba (central nowadays Greece), in Hellenic would be pronounced as ‘tε:-ba-i’ (probably level-stressed) since ‘θ’ was voiced as aspirated ‘t’ and ‘β’ as ‘b’ where the diphthong ‘ai’ was rendered as ‘a-i’ (as the two vowels separately that is).
Seeing that the name ‘Thebes’ of the Boeotian city came from the Phoenicians, it most likely descended from an intermediate Phoenician rendering of an earlier form of demotic Egyptian ‘tꜣ jpy’ ή ‘tꜣ jpy.’
After all, the Hyksos that prevailed and ruled over a large part of, mainly Lower, Egypt for about 150 to 180 years between roughly 1710 or 1680 and 1540 BC were largely Canaanites as were the Phoenicians, which draws that the two most likely substantially overlapped.
But Canaanites already settled in considerable numbers in the eastern Delta of the Nile as early as the Twelfth Dynasty (Middle Kingdom) and 20th century BC, around the same time that Cadmus was thought to have lived.
Consequently, the Boeotian Thebes most certainly bear the same meaning of ‘Land/Place of the Temple’ in accord with the namesake Egyptian city whilst the plural form of the name (Thebai/Thebae/Θήβαι) rather falls in tune with the respective forms of ‘Athenae’ (Athenai/Αθήναι) and Mycenae (Mykē̂nai/Μυκήναι) among others.
The main interpretation attributed is that the plural form was rather due to a sisterhood of probably priestesses (under the respective name) devoted to the cult of the (principal) goddess of a city who in this case (Thebes) would bear the epithet ‘Thebe’ (Θήβη, rendered as ‘Tε:bε:’ in Hellenic), spelling ‘the goddess/lady of Thebes.’
Who, in turn, would be most likely Phrygian supreme goddess Cybele as she was venerated as principal goddess in the Thebes and quite likely as early as the Mycenaean era.
The legendary heroine Thebe that is linked with the Boeotian Thebes seems to be also Asian as daughter of Prometheus (see relative post) where there was a respective Thebe, daughter of Nile and therefore Egyptian, associated with the Egyptian city.
For that matter, there was an Egyptian local goddess named Waset venerated in the Egyptian Thebes (named also Waset by the Egyptians), Amun’s first consort at that, that may correspond to the latter Thebe spelling that this could be a conception coming all the way from Egypt as well.
Breaking through History 