1114 a, tay. xliii.) Before speaking of the monuments of Memphis we must notice its history. The foundation of the city is assigned to Menes, the first king of Egypt, head of the 1st dynasty (Herod., ii. 99). The situa tion, as already observed, is admirable for a capital of the whole country, and it was probably chosen with that object. According to Herodotus, Menes raised a dyke which still protected Memphis from the inundations of the Nile. Previously the river had flowed under the Libyan range ; but Menes, by banking up the stream at the bend it took too stadia south of Memphis, made the ancient channel dry, and dug a new course for the river between the two ranges of hills. The historian adds, that in his time the Persians carefully guarded the point where the Nile had been forced into the new channel, lest Memphis should be endangered by a flood (/. c.) Sir Gardner Wilkinson observes, The dyke of Menes was probably near the modern Kafr el-Eiyat, 14 miles south of Meet Raheeneh, where the Nile takes a considerable bend, and from which point it would (if the pre vious direction of its course continued) run imme diately below the Libyan mountains, and over the site of Memphis. Calculating from the outside of Memphis, this bend agrees exactly with the hun dred stadia, or nearly 1t2 English miles—Meet Raheeneh being about the centre of the old city. No traces of these dykes (sic) are now seen' (Raw linson's Herod., vol. ii., p. 163, note 6). Herodotus also states that Menes excavated a lake outside the town to the north and west, communicating with the river which bounded it on the east (ii. 99). That the dyke has been allowed to fall into neglect, and ultimately to disappear, may be ac counted for by the gradual obliteration of the old bed, and the cessation of any necessity to keep the inundation from the site of Memphis, which, on the contrary, as the city contracted, became cultivable soil and required to be annually fertilized. But are we to suppose that Menes executed the great engineering works attributed to him ? It is remarkable that the higher we advance towards the beginnings of Egyptian history, the more vast are the works of manual labour. The Lake Mceris, probably excavated under the 6th dynasty, put to shade all later works of its or any other kind executed in Egypt. The chief pyra mids, which, if reaching down to this time, can scarcely reach later, increase in importance as we go higher, the greatest being those of E1-Geezeh, sepul chres of the earlier kings of the 4th dynasty. This state of things implies the existence of a large serf population gradually decreasing towards later times, and shows that Menes might well have diverted the course of the Nile. The digging a new course seems doubtful, and it may be conjectured that the branch that became the main stream was already existent. It would appear from the fragments of Manetho's history that Memphis continued the seat of government of kings of all Egypt as late as the reign of Venephes the third successor of Menes. Athothis, the son and successor of Menes, built the palace there, and the king first mentioned built the pyramids near Cochome (Cory's AM". Frag., 2d ed., pp. 94-97) pyramids are scarcely seen but at Memphis, and Cochome is probably the name of part of the Memphite necropolis, as will be noticed later. The 3d dynasty was of Memphite kings, the ad and part of the 1st having probably lost the undivided rule of Egypt. The 4th dynasty, which succeeded about B. c. 244o, was the most powerful Memphite line, and under its earlier kings the pyramids of El-Geezeh were built. It is probable that other Egyptian lines Were tributary to this, which not only commanded all the resources of Egypt to the quarries of Syene on the southern border, but also worked the copper mines of the Sinaitic Peninsula. The 5th dynasty appears to have been contemporary with the 4th and 6th, the latter a Memphite house which continued the succession. At the close of the latter Memphis fell, according to our opinion, into the hands of the Shepherd kings, foreign strangers who, more or less, held Egypt for Soo years. At the beginning of the 18th dynasty we once more find hieroglyphic notices of Memphis after a silence of some centuries. During that dynasty and its two successors, while the Egyptian empire lasted, Memphis was its second city, though, as the sove reigns were Theban, Thebes was the capital. After the decline of the empire, we hear little of it until the Persian period, when the provincial dynasties gave it a preference over Thebes as the chief city of Egypt. With the Greek rule, its political importance rose, and while Thebes had dwindled to a thinly-populated collection of small towns, Memphis became the native capital, where the sovereigns were crowned by the Egyptian priests ; but Alexandria gradually destroyed its power, and the policy of the Romans hastened a natural decay. At length, after the Arab conquest, the establishment of a succession of rival capitals, on the opposite bank of the Nile, El -Fustat, El Askar, El - Kata-e, and El - Kahireh, the later Cairo, drew away the remains of its population, and at last left nothing to mark the site of the ancient capital but ruins, which were long the quarries for any who wished for costly marbles, massive columns, or mere blocks of stone for the numerous mosques of the Muslim seats of govern ment.
Of the buildings of Memphis none remain above ground ; the tombs of the neighbouring necropolis alone attest its importance. It is, however, ne cessary to speak of those temples which ancient writers mention, and especially of such of these as are known by remaining fragments. The chief temple was that of Ptah, the Egyptian Vulcan, assigned by Herodotus to Menes as its founder (ii. 99), the site of which is near the village of Meet Raheeneh. The only important vestige of this great temple, probably second only, if second, to that of Amen-ra at Thebes, now called the temple of is a broken colossal statue of lime stone representing Rameses II., which once stood, probably with a fellow that has been destroyed, be fore one of the propyla of the temple. This sta
tue, complete from the head to below the knees, is the finest Egyptian colossus known. It be longs to the British government, which has never yet spared the necessary cost of transporting it to England. Near this temple was one of Apis, or Hapi, the celebrated sacred bull, worshipped with extraordinary honours at Memphis, and from which the Israelites possibly took the idea of the golden calf. The Serapeum, or temple of Serapis, or Osir hapi, that is, Osiris-Apis, the ideal correspondent to the animal, lay in the desert to the westward, between the modem villages of Aboo-Seer and Sakkarah, though to the west of both. Near this temple was the burial-place of the bulls Apis, a vast excavation, in which they were sepulchred in sarcophagi of stone in the most costly manner. M. Mariette recently discovered this monument, and thus added greatly to our knowledge of Egypto logy, especially as the tablets in the burial-places of the sacred hulls afforded very important chrono logical and historical information. There were also at Memphis a temple of Sokari-Osiris, whence the modem name of Sakkarah (as Aboo-Seer, from Busiris, records the existence of a temple of Osiris, PA-HESAR), a temple of AY-EM-HETP, the Egyptian tEsculapius, and another of Anubis. And we must not forget that temple of the Foreign Venus (Ipbv, TO rcaXcrat Ethnic 'Arppoiiirns.) which Herodotus mentions as situate in the Tyrians' Camp orparbre6ov), inhabited in his time by Phcenicians of Tyre (ii. 112), and the fact that in a tablet of Amenoph II., of the ISth dynasty, in the opposite quarries of Tura, the Canaanite and Phcenician goddess Ashtoreth is represented as a local divinity. Perhaps the name of the camp and the worship dated from the capture of Memphis by the Shepherds. The memory of a like event was as long traditionally preserved in the Coptic name of El-Geezeh, the town on the bank of the Nile eastward of the most famous group of pyramids which, if it do not record the place of the Persian camp when Cambyses besieged Memphis, must record something similar during the Persian occupation.
The necropolis of Memphis has escaped the destruction that has obliterated almost all traces of the city, partly from its being beyond the con venient reach of the inhabitants of the Muslim capitals, partly from the unrivalled massive solidity of its chief edifices. The pyramids that belong to ;Memphis extend along the low edge of the Libyan range, and form four groups—those of El Geezeh, Aboo-Seer, Sakkarah, and Dahshoor—all so named from a neighbouring town or village. The principal pyramids of El-Geezeh—those called the First or Great, Second, and Third—are respec tively the tombs of Khufu or Shufu, the Cheops of Herodotus and Suphis I. of Manetho, of the 4th dynasty ; of Khafra or Shafra, Cephren (Hdt.), of the 5th ? and of Menkaura Mycerinus or Men cheres of the 4th. The Great Pyramid has a base measuring 733 feet square, and a perpendicular height of 456 feet, having lost about twenty-five feet of its original height, which must have been at least 480 feet (Mr. Lane in Mrs. Poole's Englishwoman in Egypt, ii., pp. In, 125). It is of solid stone, except a low core of rock, and a very small space allowed for chambers and passages leading to them. The Second Pyramid is not tar inferior to this in size. Next in order come the two stone pyramids of Dahshoor. The rest are much smaller. Li the Dahshoor group are two built of crude brick, the only examples in the Memphite necro polis. The whole number that can now be traced is upwards of thirty, but Dr. Lepsius supposes that anciently there were about sixty, including those south of Dahshoor, the last of which are as far as the Feiyoom, about sixty miles above the site of Memphis by the course of the river. The prin cipal pyramids in the Memphite necropolis are twenty in number ; the pyramid of Aboo-Ruweysh, the three chief pyramids of El-Geezeh, the three of Aboo-Seer, the nine of Sakkarah, and the four of Dahshoor. The pyramids' built by Venephes near Cochome may have been in the groups of Aboo-Seer, at Sakkarah, for the part of the necropolis where the Serapeum lay was called in Egyptian KEta-rtda or KA-KEM, also KEA! or KEMEE, as Brugsch has shown, remarking as its probable identity with Cochome (G. I., i., p. 240, Nos. 1121, 1122, 1123, lay. xliii.) The pyramids were tombs of kings, and possibly of members of royal families. Around them were the tombs of subjects, of which the oldest were probably in general of the time of the king who raised each pyramid. The private tombs were either built upon the rock, or excavated, wherever it presented a suitable face in which a grotto could be cut, and in either case the mummies were deposited in chambers at the foot of deep piti. Sometimes these pits were not guarded by the upper structure or grotto, though probably they were then originally protected by crude brick walls. A curious inquiry is suggested by the circumstance that the Egyptians localized in the neighbourhood of Memphis those terrestrial scenes which they sup posed to symbolize the geography of the hidden world, and that in these the Greeks found the first ideas of their own poetical form of the more pre cise belies of the older race, of the Acherusian Lake, the Ferry, Charon, and the Meads of .Asphodel,' but this captivating subject cannot be here pursued (see Brugsch, G. I., i., pp. 240, The notices of Memphis in the Bible are wholly of the period of the kings. Many have thought that the Land of Goshen lay not very far from this city, and that the Pharaohs who protected the Israelites, as well as their oppressors, ruled at Memphis. The indications of Scripture seem, however, to point to the valley through which ran the canal of the Red Sea, the Wadi-t-Tumeylat of the present inhabitants of Egypt, as the old Land of Goshen, and to Zoan, or Tanis, as the capital of the oppressors, if not also of the Pharaohs who protected the Israelites. A careful examination of the narrative of the events that preceded the Exodus seems indeed to put any city not in the easternmost portion of the Delta wholly out of the question.