At Elephantinê honours were paid to “the great” god of the Nile, who rose from his caverns in the neighbourhood. Of this we have been assured by a mutilated Greek inscription on a large slab of granite which was discovered by English sappers at Assuan in 1885. It records the endowments and privileges which were granted to the priests of Elephantinê by the earlier Ptolemies, and one line of it refers to the places “wherein is the fountain of the Nile.” But long before the days of the Ptolemies and of Greek visitors to Egypt, when the First Cataract was the boundary of Egyptian rule and knowledge, the fountain of the Nile was already placed immediately beyond it. This infantile belief of Egyptian mythology was preserved, like so much else of prehistoric antiquity, in the mythology of later days. In the temple of Redesîyeh, on the road from Edfu to Berenikê, an inscription relates how Seti I. dug a well in the desert and how the water gushed up, “as from the depth of the two Qerti of Elephantinê.” Here the bottomless springs are transferred from Bigeh to Elephantinê, thus explaining how Herodotos could have been led into his error of supposing them to be two mountains between Elephantinê and Assuan. Doubtless the sacred scribe had marked the position of the island of Bigeh by its relation to the better known island of Elephantinê.
The very name of the city which stood on the southern extremity of Elephantinê implied that here, in the days of its foundation, was placed the source of the Egyptian Nile. It was called Qebhu, the city of “fresh water,” a word represented by the picture of a vase from which water is flowing. At times the city was also called Abu, but Abu was more correctly the name of the island on which it stood. Abu, in fact, signified the island “of elephants,” of which the Greek Elephantinê was but a translation. In that early age, when it first became known to the Egyptians, the African elephant must still have existed there.
Herodotos does not seem to have been aware that Elephantinê was an island as well as a city. Except where he is reporting the words of the sacred scribe, he always speaks of it as “a city,” sometimes to the exclusion of the more important Syênê. It is another sign that his voyage up the Nile did not extend so far.