[link to www.illinoishistory.com]

There are two schools of thought on how this Land Between the Rivers became known as Egypt. The first says the regional name developed because of the existence of Egyptian place names such as Cairo and Thebes. The second argument says the region was named after settlers in the northern part of the state had to travel to Southern Illinois to buy grain after a series of bad winters or droughts. The settlers in their wagon trains were similar to the ancient Israelites traveling unto Egypt to buy grain.

The trouble with both of these arguments is that they are both right, and they're both wrong as well, because the Egyptian city names and the bad winters occurred after the region got its moniker. But both stories are true to the extent that they helped spread acceptance of the name.

One of the first persons to associate Southern Illinois with Egypt was John Badgley, a Baptist missionary to the French and Indian villages in the American Bottoms. Badgley was a preacher in the newly-settled American towns of New Design and Bellefontaine in what's now Monroe County. They were settled after the Revolutionary War during the 1790s.

In 1799, during his travels among the French settlements, he went up on top of the bluffs in the area of what's now Edwardsville and dubbed the fertile highlands and bottoms the "Land of Goshen." Being a preacher, he knew that the Bible referred to Goshen as the best land of ancient Egypt. It was the land the pharaoh gave to Joseph's family after they came to Egypt.

That Bagdley is the one is credited with the name "Goshen" is not disputed. Neither is the Biblical reference to Egypt. So why did he give the area the Egyptian name? If the land was so good, why not call it Canaan, the land the Bible describes as a land of milk and honey?

Regrettably, Badgley didn't give us the answer, but the answer may be visible even today. As you stand on top of the bluffs above the American Bottoms you see a grand river valley that even in 1799, settlers knew contained the longest river on the continent, if not the world. There are only two rivers longer than the combined Missouri-Mississippi Rivers, and those are the Amazon and the Nile.

Baptist preachers on the frontier probably did not know much if anything about the Amazon, but the Nile was well known to European Civilization. Thus the Mississippi itself probably led to the first reference to Egypt.

Another reason why Badgley may have chosen Goshen over Canaan, was that Canaan represented home to the Israelites, where Goshen was part of a foreign country. In 1799, Illinois was almost like a foreign country. New Spain was just across the river. The predominant European language in the state was French, not English. The American Bottoms were so named because at that time they were the western border of the United States.

But this part of Illinois was not just foreign, it was ancient, like Egypt itself. In the Carolinas, when settlers traveled west they met the Cherokees, an Indian nation that had lived in the southern Appalachians for centuries. Beyond that was Kentucky, a pristine wilderness untouched by permanent settlement, even by the Indians. Even further west was Southern Illinois.

Like Kentucky, Southern Illinois was mostly a hunting ground without large permanent Indian villages, at least until the French came and encouraged the Illini to settle among them. But unlike Kentucky, there was a mysterious air to the region. Along the rivers one could see various mounds, in the hills, ancient stone forts, and up the Mississippi itself, the largest mounds of them all near Cahokia.

So the Mississippi Valley not only served as a reminder to the Nile, the local mounds gave a faint physical resemblance to the pyramids of Egypt. The mounds and ruins of stone forts gave evidence of an ancient culture that had been more advanced than the Indian cultures that inhabited the state at the end of the 18th Century.