Caphtor

Caphtor (Hebrew: כַּפְתּוֹר‎ Kaftōr) is a locality mentioned in the Bible, in which its people are called Caphtorites or Caphtorim and are named as a division of the ancient Egyptians.

Tradition regarding the location of Caphtor was preserved in the Aramaic Targums and in the commentary of Maimonides which place it at Caphutkia in the vicinity of Damietta[5] (at the eastern edge of the Nile delta near classical Pelusium).

This view is supported by the tenth century biblical exegete Saadia Gaon,[6] and by Benjamin of Tudela, the twelfth-century Jewish traveller from Navarre, who both wrote that Damietta was Caphtor.

KUR is a determinative indicating a country, while one possible reading of the sign DUGUD is kabtu, whence the name of the place would be Kabturi, which resembles Caphtor.

[3] Prior to the discovery of the reference to H-k-p-t scholars had already considered the possibility of iy Caphtor found in Jeremiah being the Semitic cognate of "Egypt".

[10] The name k-p-t-ȝ-r is found written in hieroglyphics in a list of locations in the Ptolemaic temple of Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt and is regarded as a reference to Caphtor.

In Caphtor / Keftiu: a New Investigation, John Strange argues that the late geographical lists referenced in the preceding paragraph cannot be taken at face value, as they appear to be "random" collections of antique place names, and contain other corruptions and duplicates.

The seventeenth-century scholar Samuel Bochart[18] understood this as a reference to Cappadocia in Anatolia but John Gill writes that these translations relate to Caphutkia.

The identification with Coptus is recorded in Osborne's A Universal History From The Earliest Account of Time,[19] where it is remarked that many suppose the name to have originated from Caphtor.

Wainwright's theory is not widely accepted, as his evidence shows at most a cultural exchange between Keftiu and Anatolia without pinpointing its location on the Mediterranean coast.

[28] The stone base of a statue during the reign of Amenhotep III includes the name kftı͗w in a list of Mediterranean ship stops prior to several Cretan cities such as Kydonia, Phaistos, and Amnisos, showing that the term clearly refers to the Aegean.