Memphis

Memphis was founded at the junction of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BC and served as capital or co-capital for most of the Pharaonic period, a city that Herodotus described and that covered a very large area of what is now cultivation and village. Almost nothing of it is visible: the Nile shifted, the mud brick dissolved, and the stone was quarried for Cairo. What survives is an open-air museum in a palm grove holding the pieces too large to carry away, above all a limestone colossus of Ramesses II around ten metres long lying on its back in a purpose-built shelter, so that you look down on the face from a gallery, and an alabaster sphinx of about eighty tonnes standing in the garden. The site is part of the Memphis and its Necropolis World Heritage inscription.

History

According to Manetho, writing in the early 3rd century BC, Memphis was founded by King Menes, who diverted the Nile with dikes to build it, though an inscription found in Sinai in 2012 shows the predynastic king Iry-Hor visiting Memphis two generations before Narmer. It was the capital of Egypt through the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom, for more than six dynasties, and reached its height of prestige under the Sixth Dynasty as the centre of the cult of Ptah, whose temple the alabaster sphinx still guards. The city declined after the Eighteenth Dynasty as Thebes rose, revived under the Persians and fell to second place after Alexandria was founded; after Fustat was established in 641 it was largely abandoned and quarried for stone, still an imposing ruin in the 12th century but soon little more than low ruins and scattered stone (Wikipedia, Memphis, Egypt).

The main sights

• The fallen colossus of Ramesses II - ten metres of limestone seen from above.
• The alabaster sphinx - eighty tonnes of translucent stone in the garden.
• Statue and stela fragments - what was too heavy to be carried off.
• The palm grove setting - cultivation covering the vanished capital.

When to go

October to April. One to two hours, and it is almost always visited as a stop on the way to Saqqara rather than on its own. Mornings before the Saqqara coaches arrive are quietest.

Before you go

There is very little here relative to the historical importance, and visitors who have read about Memphis often leave flat. The open-air museum is small and the grounds are unkempt in places. Vendors at the gate are persistent. Treat it as a twenty-minute stop attached to Saqqara.

Nearby

Saqqara is a few kilometres west; Dahshur lies further south along the desert edge.

Key facts