The "Meadow of the Egyptians", according to Genesis 50:11. A threshing-floor near the river Yarden (Jordan), which was previously known as the threshing-floor of Atad; this was where Yoseph and his Egyptian entourage stopped en route to Kena'an to mourn for Ya'akov. To mourn, for seven full days (to "sit shiva" in Yehudit means "to sit in mourning for seven days") but not to bury him there; odd to mourn before burial, but Genesis 50:13 insists that they travelled on from Avel Mitsrayim-Atad to Chevron, and buried Ya'akov in the Cave of Machpelah, alongside most of the other patri- and matriarchs.
The concept of an Avel or "meadow" for a burial-ground fits our modern sense of cemeteries, but was in fact far less normative in Biblical times, where tombs, pyramids, cairns, sepulchres and tumuli tended to be rather more common, and in some of the lands further to both the west and east cremation. Other "meadows" are known, as for example Avel Beyt Ma'achah (אבל בית מעכה), also known as Avel Mayim (אבל מים) "the meadow of water" (2 Samuel 20:14); Avel Ha-Shittim (אבל השטים), "the meadow of acacias" on the plains of Mo-Av (Numbers 33:49); Avel-Keramim (אבל כרמים), "the meadow of the vineyards", in Ammonite territory (Judges 11:33); Avel Mecholah (אבל מחולה), "the meadow of dancing", the village in Yisaschar where Elisha the prophet was born (Judges 7:22); and others.
In each case we can presume that by meadow is meant "a burial-ground", probably associated with megalithic dolmen-barrows. This would explain why the word Evel (אבל), which is written the same without the nekudot, means "mourning" - modern Jews use the term Avelut, which comes from the same root. It therefore makes much more sense to translate Avel Mitsrayim as "the mourning-place of the Egyptians" and to locate it at Atad, rather than attempting an irrelevant re-naming.
The use of the threshing-floor as a place of mourning and a place of burial links Ya'akov, and more particularly Yoseph, to the corn-god, who would have been threshed on such a floor, and being Egyptian specifically to Osher (Osiris).
Gnostic/Egyptian legends of Jesus have him born on a threshing-floor in Beit-Lechem, which is not strange since Beit Lechem means "the house of bread", the form in which the corn-god is eaten - fully Beit Lechem Ephratah, the Shrine of the Corn-God of the Euphrates, which is to say Tammuz, the Babylonian equivalent of Osher. And quite probably "manger" is just a poor translation of "threshing-floor" - both are stables filled with straw, after all.
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