Thebes

The Mycenaean Greek name of the city, te-qa, written in the Linear B syllabary on the tablets found in the Bronze Age palace of Thebes, the Kadmeion. Thebes is one of the few cities, with Knossos and Pylos, that kept its own archive, so its name survives in the oldest written Greek, the administration of the palace recording te-qa among its accounts before the citadel burned around 1200 BCE.

te-qa is a small entry with a precise philological payoff. The sign qa spells a labiovelar, a kʷ/gʷ sound that Mycenaean Greek still had and that later Greek lost, resolving it variously into p, t, or b; te-qa stands for Thēgʷai, and that gʷ is exactly the sound that classical Greek turned into the b of Thêbai. The tablet thus shows the name a stage earlier than any alphabetic Greek can, the Bronze Age form with its labiovelar intact, the deepest root of “Thebes” and a direct glimpse of a sound that vanished from Greek before Homer.

The Greek name of the city, Thêbai, a plural, the seven-gated city of Boeotia and the setting of the darkest of the Greek myth-cycles: the founding by Cadmus, the doom of Oedipus, the war of the Seven, the madness of the daughters of Cadmus who tore Pentheus apart for Dionysus. The name is pre-Greek, of no certain meaning, one more of the old Aegean place-names the Greeks inherited.

Thêbai carries one of the most insistent homonyms in ancient geography. The Greeks used the very same name for the great Egyptian city on the Nile, distinguishing the two only by epithet: the Boeotian Thebes is heptápylos, “seven-gated,” the Egyptian Thebes hekatómpylos, “hundred-gated.” Homer’s hundred-gated Thebes is Egypt’s; the Thebes of Oedipus has seven gates, one for each of the Seven who attacked it. A single pre-Greek word thus names both the largest temple-city of Egypt and a town in central Greece, and Greek had to count the gates to tell them apart.

The Latin name of the city, Thēbae, taken from the Greek, the form under which the matter of Thebes passed into Latin literature, above all in Statius’s Thebaid, the long epic of the war of the Seven and the fratricide of the sons of Oedipus. To Rome, Thebes was a byword for a house destroying itself, the archetype of civil war among brothers.

Thēbae inherits the Greek homonym along with the name: Latin too used Thebae for both the Boeotian city and the Egyptian one, and Roman writers, like the Greeks, distinguished them by the count of gates. Through the Latin the name reached the modern languages, where the ambiguity survives, so that “Thebes” in English still must be told apart, the Greek city of Oedipus from the Egyptian city of Amun, by which one is meant. The seven-gated and the hundred-gated share their name to this day.