A city at the hinge
Memphis was founded around 3000 BCE at the point where the Nile valley opens into the Delta, about 20 km south of modern Cairo. Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century BCE, was told that Menes, the first king, had built a dyke to push the river aside and found the city on the drained land. Whatever the truth of the story, the place was well chosen. From the head of the Delta, whoever ruled could control every boat moving between the south and the north, and reach the desert roads to quarries and oases. It was the obvious capital for the first kings of a country that had just been unified.
A city with three names
The Egyptians first called it Ineb-hedj, “White Walls”, probably after the whitewashed walls of the royal fortress. Later the name of the pyramid of King Pepi I at nearby Saqqara, Men-nefer, “lasting and beautiful”, spread to the town, and the Greeks turned it into Memphis. The temple of the city’s god Ptah was called Hut-ka-Ptah, “the house of the spirit of Ptah”. The Greeks heard it as Aigyptos, and from that word comes “Egypt”. In other words, the whole country is named after a temple in this city.
The god of craftsmen
Ptah was a creator god who made the world by thinking it and speaking it, and the patron of sculptors, builders and metalworkers. The choice suits the city. Memphis was the place of royal workshops, of the palace and of the treasury, of the offices that counted grain and organised workers. For most of the Old Kingdom (c. 2686-2181 BCE), this is where the pyramids were planned. Their builders and their stone came through Memphis, and the royal cemeteries spread along the desert ridge to the west: Saqqara with the Step Pyramid of Djoser, Abusir, Giza with the Great Pyramid, and Dahshur. UNESCO protects them together as “Memphis and its Necropolis”, over some 30 km.
Still important after it lost the throne
In the Middle and New Kingdoms the religious and royal centre moved south to Thebes, but Memphis never stopped mattering. It was the base of the army for campaigns into Asia, the seat of foreign embassies, a busy port and, in later centuries, the place where kings were crowned: the Rosetta Stone records the coronation of Ptolemy V at Memphis in 196 BCE. Ramesses II filled the temple of Ptah with colossal statues of himself. In the Late Period the sacred Apis bulls, believed to be living images of Ptah, were embalmed at Memphis and buried in huge granite coffins in the underground galleries of the Serapeum at Saqqara, discovered by Auguste Mariette in 1850-51.
So where did it go?
The decline was slow and had several causes. In 331 BCE Alexander the Great founded Alexandria on the coast, and under the Ptolemies and the Romans the new city took over trade and government. Memphis remained a religious centre, but its population fell. Then Christianity closed the temples. After the Arab conquest of 641 CE a new capital, Fustat, grew up on the other bank, followed by Cairo, and Memphis became a quarry: its limestone blocks were burnt for lime or reused in new buildings across the river.
Even so, around 1200 the Baghdad scholar Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi described ruins so vast and full of statues that, he wrote, words could not do them justice. What finally erased the city was water and mud. Most of Memphis was built of mudbrick, which melts back into earth, and over the centuries the Nile floods covered the remains with silt. Today fields and villages grow over them, and archaeologists find the city in layers, sometimes below the water table.
Where to see it
Mit Rahina, about 20 km south of Cairo, has a small open-air museum on the site of the temple of Ptah. Its star is a limestone colossus of Ramesses II, about 10 metres long, lying on its back in a covered hall. Around it stand an alabaster sphinx, the stone tables on which the Apis bulls were embalmed, and blocks and statues from the temple. Another Ramesses from the same temple, in red granite, now stands in the atrium of the Grand Egyptian Museum. Saqqara is a few kilometres away, and Dahshur and Giza can be reached in the same day. Check opening times with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Memphis and its Necropolis: the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur”.
- D. G. Jeffreys, The Survey of Memphis, Egypt Exploration Society (1985-).
- Herodotus, Histories, II, 99.
- UCL, Digital Egypt for Universities, “Memphis”.
- Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, Kitab al-Ifada wa-l-I’tibar (c. 1204).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Memphis, ancient city, Egypt”.
