Pispir

Athanasius gives no name to the place of Antony the Great’s first withdrawal. He says that Antony went to “the mountain”, found a deserted fort on the other side of the river and shut himself in it for nearly twenty years, and that cells of monks then arose in the mountains (Athanasius, Life of Antony 12–14). Later in the Life the settlement of his monks is called the outer mountain, as distinct from the inner mountain where he spent his last years (Athanasius, Life of Antony 89, 91); see Mount Colzim. Palladius, writing about 420, reports the monk Cronius as saying that Antony’s monastery “by the River”, where his two disciples lived and where he came at intervals to receive visitors, was at the place called Pispir, and that his mountain lay between Babylon and Heracleopolis, about thirty miles from the river (Palladius, Lausiac History 21.1–2). The Life does not say that the fort and the later settlement were the same spot, and the site has not been fixed; it is placed here at the village of Deir el-Maimun, on the east bank between those two towns, where it is usually sought.