Mount Colzim

Athanasius gives the mountain no name. He says that Antony the Great, seeking solitude, travelled for three days and nights with a party of Saracens into the inner desert and came to a very high mountain with a spring of cold water at its foot and a few palm trees, and that he made it his home (Athanasius, Life of Antony 49–50). The Life calls it “the inner mountain” (Athanasius, Life of Antony 51), as distinct from the outer mountain where his monks lived (Athanasius, Life of Antony 89, 91). Antony died there, and at his own wish was buried in a place that only two companions knew (Athanasius, Life of Antony 91–92). Palladius, about 420, places Antony’s mountain in the desert that leads to the Red Sea, about thirty miles from the Nile (Palladius, Lausiac History 21.1). The name Colzim, and the identification with the mountain above the Monastery of Saint Antony between the Nile and the Red Sea, come from later tradition. Antony came here only after about 311; his earlier retreat was beside the Nile, at Pispir.