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.

What you actually see

• 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.

Honest expectations

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.