Menes, “the constant,” reigned at Tini. He built Memphis, on part of whose site Cairo now stands, but whose centre was further up the Nile. The Egyptian name was Mennofer, “the good place.” The ruins of Memphis were well preserved down to the thirteenth century, and were then glowingly described by an Arab physician, Latif. But the stones were gradually transported to Cairo, and its ruins reappeared in the mosques and palaces of that place.
Westward of the Nile, and some distance from it, was the Necropolis of Memphis—its common and royal burying ground, with its wealth of tombs, overlooked by the stupendous buildings of the pyramids which rose high above the monuments of the noblest among the noble families who, even after life was done, reposed in deep pits at the feet of their lords and masters. The contemporaries of the third (3966 B.C. to 3766 B.C.), fourth (3733 B.C. to 3600 B.C.) and fifth (3566 B.C. to 3333 B.C.) dynasties are here buried and their memories preserved by pictures and writings on the walls of their chambers above their tombs. This is the fountain of that stream of traditions which carries us back to the oldest dynasty of that oldest country. If those countless tombs had been preserved entire to us, we could, in the light of modern interpretation, read with accuracy the genealogies of the kings and the noble lines that erected them. A few remaining heaps enable us to know what they mean and to appreciate the loss to history occasioned by their destruction.
They have served to rescue from oblivion the fact that the Pharaohs of Memphis had a title which was “King of Upper and Lower Egypt.” At the same time he was “Peras,” “of the great house”—written Pharaoh in the Bible. He was a god for his subjects, a lord par excellence, in whose sight there should be prostration and a rubbing of the ground with noses. They saluted him with the words “his holiness.” The royal court was composed of the nobility of the country and servants of inferior rank. The former added to dignity of origin the graces of wisdom, good manners, and virtue. Chiefs, or scribes carried on the affairs of the court.
The monuments clearly speak of Senoferu, of the third dynasty, B.C. 3766. A ravine in the Memphian Necropolis, where are many ancient caverns, contains a stone picture of Senoferu, who appears as a warrior striking an enemy to the ground with a mighty club. The rock inscriptions mention his name, with the title of “vanquisher of foreign peoples” who in his time inhabited the cavernous valleys in the mountains round Sinai.
The Pharaohs of the fourth dynasty were the builders of the hugest of the pyramids. The tables discovered at Abydos make Khufu the successor of Senoferu. Khufu is the Cheops of the historian Herodotus. His date was 3733 B.C.
No spirited traveler ever sets foot on the black soil of Egypt, without gazing on that wonder of antiquity, the threefold mass of the pyramids on the steep edge of the desert, an hour’s ride over the long causeway extending out from Ghiseh. The desert’s boundless sea of yellow sand, whose billows are piled up around the gigantic pyramids, deeply entombing the tomb, surges hot and dry far up the green meadows and mingles with the growing grass and corn. From the far distance you see the giant forms of the pyramids, as if they were regularly crystalized mountains, which the ever-creating nature has called forth from the mother soil of rock, to lift themselves up towards the blue vault of heaven. And yet they are but tombs, built by the hands of men, raised by King Khufu (Cheops) and two other Pharaohs of the same family and dynasty, to be the admiration and astonishment of the ancient and modern world.
PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT.