Enaton
In Arabic, it is also sometimes called al-Hanatun (from Enaton), Bihanatun (from Graeco-Coptic ⲡⲓϩⲉⲛⲁⲧⲟⲛ, Pi-Hennaton) and Tunbatarun (from Greek Ton Pateron, "[monastery] of the Fathers").
The Ethiopic translation of the Arabic version of John of Nikiu's Chronicle calls the monastery Bantun, evidently a corruption of al-Hanatun.
[4] The exact location of the Enaton is not known, but it must have lain on the taenia (strip of land) between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mareotis.
The taenia was densely populated in late antiquity, with monasteries also at the fifth mile (Pempton), eighteenth (Oktokaidekaton) and twentieth (Eikoston).
[3] In the early 20th century, archaeologists identified funerary stelae and the ruins of a church near the village of Dikhaylah as coming from the Enaton.
When Hilaria, daughter of the Emperor Zeno (r. 474–491), tried to enter the monastery of Scetis, Abbot Pembo recommended that she join the Enaton instead because "it is moderate; there is at this time a group of wealthy people who have made themselves monks; they live without fatigue; they find consolation.
It was composed of numerous autonomous foundations that varied in size from a lone hermit in a cell to large communities of monks.
Each koinobion had its own church and was under the rule of a superior with the title hegumen, cenobiarch or proestos and usually referred to as "father" (apa or abba).
Still, "the many establishments at the Enaton must have given it the appearance of a large town with irregular streets, houses with terraced roofs, and dogs running about.
[2][4] There are hagiographic sources that push back the Enaton's history to the time of the Diocletianic persecution in late 3rd or early 4th century, but their reliability is questionable.
[4] John of Ephesus, in his Lives of Peter and Photius (written c. 565), takes the name "Monastery of the Fathers" to refer to the Enaton as a whole.
[2] According to Basil of Oxyrhynchus, in a sermon on Longinus' virtues, the monastery founded by Abba Gaius from Corinth had originally been outside the Enaton.
[2] Explicitly Miaphysite theology arrived at the Enaton in 453 with Peter the Iberian and his followers, who were exiled from Maiuma in Palestine.
[2] Other Miaphysite and anti-Chalcedonian exiles from Palestine and Syria followed: Julian of Halicarnassus, Severus of Antioch (518), Tumo of Ḥarqel (599) and Paul of Tella (599).
[4] According to Zacharias Rhetor's biography of Severus of Antioch, there was a holy man named Salama (fl.
[3] In the 480s, some monks of the Enaton collaborated with the Chalcedonian monastery of the Metanoia east of Alexandria against a (by then illegal) shrine of Isis at Menouthis.
[3] The Miracles of Abba Mina, possibly written as early as 1363, was attributed in the 18th century to a certain Archimandrite Mardarius of Gabal al-Niaton, perhaps a corrupted reference to the Enaton.
[4] Al-Maqrizi wrote in the 15th century that the monastery of Dayr al-Zujaj was also known as al-Hanatun and was dedicated to Bu Gurg the Elder, Saint George.
The decline of the monastery probably owes something to the disruption of the coastal traffic during the Crusades and the desertification of Lake Mareotis.
