Circumstantial evidence suggests that the site lies beneath cultivated fields east of the pyramids of Amenemhat I and Senusret I at Lisht.

[3]: 266 There is evidence that Amenemhat, the founder of the 12th Dynasty who ruled approximately 1991 to 1962 BC, established Itjtawy during his regnal year 20, replacing Thebes as the capital of Egypt.

The site for Itjtawy – hundreds of miles down the Nile from Thebes – may have been chosen for its proximity to the source of Asiatic incursions into Egypt, in order to help prevent further attacks.

[4] Since the determinative sign for Itjtawy is that of a fortified enclosure instead of the conventional city hieroglyph, Egyptologist Steven Snape suggested that Itjtawy was a "disembedded capital", a small center comprising administrative buildings and a royal residence, inhabited only by the administrative staff who ran those buildings; the major economic and cultural centers remained pre-existing cities such as Memphis and Thebes.

It is believed that at this point the invasion of Lower Egypt by populations from Canaan occurred, which led to the fall of the Middle Kingdom into the Second Intermediate Period; the pharaohs of the 13th Dynasty thus abandoned Itjtawy and retreated back to Thebes in the south.