Arish

• 1. Introduction

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  Arish sits on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, 344 kilometers northeast of Cairo and only 45 kilometers from the Egypt-Gaza border. As the capital of the North Sinai Governorate and the largest city on the Sinai Peninsula, it counted an estimated 204,391 residents in 2023. The city spreads across the mouth of Wadi al-Arish, a 250 kilometer watercourse that only carries water at certain times of year. Scholars have puzzled over where its name came from since the word was first written down in the 9th century. No single theory has fully won out. Long before Arish, ancient writers gave this coastal spot other names entirely. Those names were tied to a king's cruelty and to a strip of land fought over by empire after empire. Armies, pilgrims, and diplomats have all left their mark here. Even now, the city finds itself pulled into conflicts far larger than its size would suggest. What follows traces the disputed origin of a name, the empires that passed through, and the wars that keep returning to this coastline.

• 2. Etymology of a Contested Name

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  Before it was Arish, this coastal spot was called Rinokoroura, a name Greek and Coptic writers used through antiquity and into the Early Middle Ages. The modern Arabic name first appears in written records in the 9th century, and five separate theories try to explain where it came from. One holds that Arab settlers phonetically transcribed an older toponym. The only real candidate is a name called Ariza, recorded by the writer Hierokles, and it is too obscure to interpret with confidence. Another theory proposes the name change happened under Byzantine rule. But no Arab source mentions such a switch, and no one has found a plausible reason for it.

  In the 7th or 8th century, according to a third theory, a new settlement of huts, arsh in Arabic, rose after Rinokoloura fell into ruin. That collapse is thought to have happened in the first half of the 7th century. The new arrivals reportedly named their home after their own poor living conditions. The scholar M. Ignace de Rossi traced the name a different way. He derived it from an Egyptian word, ϫⲟⲣϣⲁ(ⲓ), which he treated as an equivalent of the Greek Rinocorura.

  A Coptic-Arabic colophon dated to 1616 offers a concrete, if puzzling, clue. It names a writer, Solomon of Shorpo, son of Michael, and places him in a city called Mohonon. Yet the same document's Arabic version calls him a man of el-Arish instead. The scholar Timm has suggested that Shorpo could simply be another name for el-Arish itself. Five theories, one name that still resists a firm answer. The next puzzle over Arish's origins reaches back further still, to a Persian king and a punishment involving noses.

• 3. The King Who Cut Off Noses

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  Classic authors explained the ancient name as a compound of two Greek words, rhis for nose and koloúo for curtail or cut short. Following a version recorded by Seneca, modern scholars believe that in the 4th century BC a Persian king campaigned through Syria. That king was either Artaxerxes II or Artaxerxes III. He is said to have punished a group of people, possibly an entire tribe, by cutting off their noses. The places connected to these disfigured people were then renamed to reflect what had been done to them. It is possible the Greek name Rinokoloura existed from the very start, translating an original name with the same grim meaning in another language.

  When the city passed into the Ptolemaic Empire, an Egyptian version of the story replaced the Persian king with an Ethiopian one, named Actisanes. Diodorus first recorded this account, drawing on the Aegyptiaca, a 4th century BC work by Hecataeus of Abdera. In this telling, Actisanes conquered Egypt during the reign of King Amasis and ruled with justice and benevolence. Rather than executing convicted criminals, he ordered their noses cut off. He then had them relocated to a city at the desert's edge, near the border between Egypt and Syria. Two different empires told two different versions of the same story, a king who punished people by cutting off their noses. What happened once the city belonged to Rome and its heirs involves bishops, a fugitive prince, and a papyrus praising the goddess Isis.

• 4. Rulers, Refugees, and a Goddess

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  The Greek historian Herodotus once wrote of a city called Ienysos, located somewhere between Lake Serbonis and a place named Kadytis. Some scholars think Ienysos may have been an earlier version of what later became Rinokoloura, though no clear evidence confirms the link. Once Egypt fell under Ptolemaic rule, Rinocoroura marked the last city of Egypt itself, sitting directly on the border with Coele-Syria.

  In the spring of 168 BCE, during the second invasion led by Antiochus IV, an embassy sent by Ptolemy VI met the king near Rinokoloura. Roughly a decade later, around 79 BCE, the city came under the rule of the Judaean Kingdom led by Alexander Jannaeus. By 40 BCE, the city had become a waypoint for a fleeing prince. Herod I sought refuge in Rinokoloura on his way to Pelusium, and it was there that he received news of his brother's death.

  A papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus, sometimes called an invocation of Isis or a Greek Isis litany, mentions Rinokoloura by name. Though transcribed during the reign of Trajan or Hadrian, its composition is believed to date to the late 1st century. It repeatedly praises Isis, calling her all seeing, or parantoptin in the original Greek. A number of funerary steles found in and around the city repeat the same consolation, that nobody is immortal. Within a few centuries, this same coastline would take on a very different character, shaped by bishops and scholars rather than kings and armies.

• 5. Bishops, Scholars, and a Border That Moved

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  Athanasius's letter to Serapion contains the earliest reliable Christian reference to the city. It records that a man named Salomon was appointed bishop of Rinokoloura, possibly in 339 AD. Writing in the mid-5th century, Sozomen described Rinokoloura as a center of scholarship. He mentioned a meditation school, a phrontisterion, standing in the desert north of the city. He also described a church lit by oil lamps and an episcopal dwelling where the entire clergy resided and dined together.

  Hieronymus reported in the early 5th century that the people of Rinokoloura and nearby cities spoke Syrian. Most epitaphs found in the area, however, are written in Greek, with only one in Coptic. It remains unclear exactly which part of the population Hieronymus meant. In 610 AD, according to John of Nikiu, the army of a general named Bonosos passed through the city on its way to Athribis. At the time, the city was recorded under a corrupted name, Bikuran.

  A story told by Hesychios of Jerusalem points to a wadi that once existed near Rinokoloura. The Septuagint's translation of Isaiah 27:12 renders 'the brook of Egypt,' a phrase marking the southern border of Israel, as Rinokoloura. That choice suggests the translators knew of a similar brook near the city. Yet the link between Rinokoloura and the brook of Egypt may simply reflect a political border that had shifted further south since the 8th century AD. That shifting border, and the empires that redrew it, would keep reshaping this stretch of coast for more than a thousand years to come.

• 6. Desert Port, Then and Now

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  About 50 kilometers from the Rafah Border Crossing into the Gaza Strip, Arish sits at the center of an ambitious resettlement plan. Egyptian government planners have targeted North Sinai as a release valve for the crowded Nile Delta. Their proposal envisions settling as many as three million Egyptians in the region, provided infrastructure, transport, and irrigation projects are completed. Arish is considered part of Bilad al-Sham, and it is the closest city to Lake Bardawil.

  Under the Köppen system, Arish carries a hot desert classification, BWh, though Mediterranean winds soften its temperatures compared to the wider desert. The highest temperature ever recorded there was 45 degrees Celsius, on the 29th of May 2003. The lowest was minus 6 degrees Celsius, recorded on the 8th of January 1994.

  El Arish International Airport connects the city by air. The Northern Coastal Highway links it by road, running from El-Qantarah at the Suez Canal through Arish to the Rafah border crossing. A rail line from Cairo remains under reconstruction, with formation works completed only as far as Bir al-Abed, west of the city. That route once formed part of the Palestine Railways, built during the World Wars to connect Egypt with Turkey, before it was severed when Israel was formed. Arish is also home to the only deep-water seaport on the entire Sinai Peninsula, capable of handling ships of up to 30,000 tonnes. Its main exports are cement, sand, salt, and marble, and the Sinai White Cement Company runs a plant 50 kilometers to the south. The port and the university, Arish University, anchor the city's life today. Centuries earlier, that same ground held an Ottoman fort that would later face a Napoleonic siege.

• 7. Fortress, Faith, and a Failed Homeland

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  In the Middle Ages, pilgrims passing through mistakenly identified this site as the biblical Sukkot. In 1560, the Ottoman Empire built new fortifications on the original site. Centuries later, during the Napoleonic Wars, French forces laid siege to that fort. It held out for 11 days before falling on the 19th of February 1799.

  Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, proposed Arish as a site for a Jewish homeland. He turned to the idea because neither Sultan Abdul Hamid II nor Kaiser Wilhelm II supported Jewish settlement in Palestine. In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, agreed to consider the Arish proposal. Herzl commissioned the lawyer David Lloyd George to draft a charter for the plan. An expedition led by Leopold Kessler traveled to the region and returned with a detailed report for Herzl. That report proposed diverting some of the Nile's waters to the area to support settlement, but the application was ultimately turned down.

  During the First World War, British bombers destroyed the same fort that had withstood the Ottomans and the French. The site later became home to the 45th Stationary Hospital, which treated casualties from the Palestine campaign. The remains of those who died there were eventually moved to Kantara Cemetery. That same war would soon bring cavalry from the other side of the world to this coast. It would also give a small Australian town its name.

• 8. A Century of War

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  In December 1916, the Anzac Mounted Division and other British Empire units captured the Arish area from Ottoman forces. That action is still remembered in Australia today: a town in Queensland was named El Arish in its honor. In 1919, the architect Robert Lorimer designed the El-Arish Military Cemetery, built for Commonwealth personnel who died in the First World War. It is one of several Commonwealth war cemeteries in the region, including two located in the Gaza Strip. During the Second World War, a Royal Air Force base known as RAF El Arish supported air-sea rescue and other operations.

  Israeli forces briefly controlled Arish twice in the mid-20th century, first during the 1948 Palestine war and again during the 1956 Suez War. On the 8th of December 1958, Egyptian and Israeli air forces fought an air battle over the city. The 1967 Arab-Israeli War brought a longer occupation: Arish remained under Israeli control until 1979, when it was returned to Egypt under the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

  That same 1967 war left a darker legacy: a massacre of Egyptian prisoners of war by Israeli forces during the Six Day War. According to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, Israeli forces killed hundreds of Egyptian prisoners and wounded soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula. This happened on the 8th of June 1967. Survivors alleged that around 400 wounded Egyptians were buried alive outside the captured El Arish International Airport. Others said 150 prisoners in the Sinai mountains were run over by Israeli tanks. In 1995, two graves holding the remains of 30 to 60 people were found near Arish, allegedly Egyptian soldiers killed after surrendering in 1967. An expedition sponsored by al-Ahram, Cairo's government-run newspaper, uncovered these mass graves of Egyptian prisoners of war.

  On the 24th of November 2017, the Islamic State attacked a mosque in al-Rawda, 45 kilometers west of Arish, in a bomb and gun assault. The Sinai mosque attack killed 305 people. On the 9th of February 2021, Islamic State terrorists killed six local residents.

  Arish's role shifted again during the 2020s Israel-Hamas Gaza war, when the city became a staging point for relief efforts into the Gaza Strip. Its seaport received relief supplies and hosted hospital ships. Outside the city, the surrounding desert held trucks loaded with supplies bound for Gaza, along with makeshift field hospitals. That turned this small port city into a supply line for a war next door.