Saft el-Hinna

Saft el-Hinna is a village and archaeological site in the Al Sharqia Governorate of Egypt, in the Nile Delta about 7 kilometres southeast of Zagazig. The modern village lies over the ancient town of Per-Sopdu, "House of Sopdu", which was the capital of the 20th nome of Lower Egypt and an important cult centre of the Late Period, consecrated to Sopdu, god of the eastern borders. In the late Third Intermediate Period it was the seat of one of the four great chiefdoms of the Meshwesh, and its medieval name was Tiarabya. The Swiss Egyptologist Edouard Naville surveyed the site in 1884 and found monuments of Nectanebo I, the walls of a temple and a naos dedicated to Sopdu. Flinders Petrie excavated nearby necropolises in 1906, though neither published a full report. The 1885 Census of Egypt recorded a population of 664, and later surveys found that almost nothing of the ruins Naville described remained.