Talk:Bigeh

Merging Abatos to this page
I just discovered a page by this title that is an obvious duplicate of this one: "Abatos, also Abaton, was a rocky island in the Nile, Egypt near Philae, where the Egyptian priests alone were permitted to enter… Some geographers identify it with the modern island of Bigeh." The sources I've seen never indicate any uncertainty about where the Abaton was. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (2000) treats them as the same place, as do Temple of the World: Sanctuaries, Cults, and Mysteries of Ancient Egypt (2013), Philae and the End of Egyptian Religion (2008), Hymns to Isis in Her Temple at Philae (1988), J. Gwyn Griffiths's commentary on Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris (1970), and numerous other sources that a Google Books search turns up.Complete Temples and Temple of the World use "Abaton" as the name of the temple, and Biga or Biggeh as the name of the island it was on. Given that there's very little left of the temple and not much on the island, it makes sense to treat them all at the broader article (the one about the island), which receives more pageviews anyway. I think the case for merging is clear enough, and the articles obscure enough, that a discussion is unnecessary, so I'm just noting my reasoning here before I carry out the merge. A. Parrot (talk) 01:42, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I've completed the merge. Some things I considered carrying over from the other article but didn't:


 * this link to a French-language website. The external link policy discourages use of non-English external links, and the site only has a few sentences about the Abaton.
 * This uncited sentence: "The name was later used by astronomers for a plateau on the moon Triton." Googling shows that Abatos Planon exists (see the French Wikipedia link), but I don't know if it was actually named for this site. Abaton means "untrodden" and was used by the Greeks to refer to rooms in their own temples to which access was restricted, so Bigeh isn't the only place the name can have come from. "Untrodden" would certainly be a fitting name for an extraterrestrial site.
 * A note that the article contains text from the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. Only the topic sentence of the Abatos article seems to have been copied from the DGRG entry, and I didn't carry it over into this article, so that note is no longer needed. A. Parrot (talk) 02:28, 29 September 2018 (UTC)