C Ernest Wright limits appropriate use of the term tel to the geographic region of Western Asia that may or may not include the Danube area. To Wright, tels are features of Asia, from Anatolia to the Indus River and southwards to Egypt's border. The presence of sites in Egypt bearing the name "tel" may be modern borrowings. In addition to having geographic limits, Wright adds a time dimension. He says they began with civilization and indicate the socio-political climate of a city-state. Linguistically, Tel(l) is Semitic. The Sumerian term was dul and was used in Old Akkadian in the 24th-23rd century B.C. to refer to the ruins of a city. The plural used for tell is tilli, which seems literally to mean hillocks.
Source: "The Tell: Basic Unit for Reconstructing Complex Societies of the Near East," by G. Ernest Wright, Charles L. Redman, Jean Perrot; Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Supplementary Studies, No. 20, "Reconstructing Complex Societies: An Archaeological Colloquium" (1974), pp. 123-143.
