CHAPTER III—MEMPHIS AND THE PYRAMIDS
Memphis, the “beautiful abode,” the “City of the White Wall,” is said to have been founded by the legendary Menés, who in order to build it diverted the stream of the Nile by means of a great dyke constructed near the modern village of Koshêsh, south of the village of Mitrahêna, which marks the central point of the ancient metropolis of Northern Egypt. It may be that the city was founded by Aha or Narmer, the historical originals of Mena or Menés; but we have another theory with regard to its foundation, that it was originally built by King Merpeba Atjab, whose tomb was also discovered at Abydos near those of Aha and Narmer. Merpeba is the oldest king whose name is absolutely identified with one occurring in the XIXth Dynasty king-lists and in Manetho. He is certainly the “Merbap” or “Merbepa” (“Merbapen”) of the lists and the Miebis of Manetho. In both the lists and in Manetho he stands fifth in order from Mena, and he was therefore the sixth king of the Ist Dynasty. The lists, Manetho, and the small monuments in his own tomb agree in making him the immediate successor of Semti Den (Ousaphaïs), and from the style of these latter it is evident that he comes after Tja, Tjer, Narmer, and Aha. That is to say, the contemporary evidence makes him the fifth king from Aha, the first original of “Menés.”
Now after the piety of Seti I had led him to erect a great temple at Abydos in memory of the ancient kings, whose sepulchres had probably been brought to light shortly before, and to compile and set up in the temple a list of his predecessors, a certain pious snobbery or snobbish piety impelled a worthy named Tunure, who lived at Memphis, to put up in his own tomb at Sakkâra a tablet of kings like the royal one at Abydos. If Osiris-Khentamenti at Abydos had his tablet of kings, so should Osiris-Seker at Sakkâra. But Tunure does not begin his list with Mena; his initial king is Merpeba. For him Merpeba was the first monarch to be commemorated at Sakkâra. Does not this look very much as if the strictly historical Merpeba, not the rather legendary and confused Mena, was regarded as the first Memphite king? It may well be that it was in the reign of Merpeba, not in that of Aha or Narmer, that Memphis was founded.
The XIXth Dynasty lists of course say nothing about Mena or Merpeba having founded Memphis; they only give the names of the kings, nothing more. The earliest authority for the ascription of Memphis to “Menés”, is Herodotus, who was followed in this ascription, as in many other matters, by Manetho; but it must be remembered that Manetho was writing for the edification of a Greek king (Ptolemy Philadelphus) and his Greek court at Alexandria, and had therefore to evince a respect for the great Greek classic which he may not always have really felt. Herodotus is not, of course, accused of any wilful misstatement in this or in any other matter in which his accuracy is suspected. He merely wrote down what he was told by the Egyptians themselves, and Merpeba was sufficiently near in time to Aha to be easily confounded with him by the scribes of the Persian period, who no doubt ascribed everything to “Mena” that was done by the kings of the Ist and IId Dynasties. Therefore it may be considered quite probable that the “Menés” who founded Memphis was Merpeba, the fifth or sixth king of the Ist Dynasty, whom Tunure, a thousand years before the time of Herodotus and his informants, placed at the head of the Memphite “List of Sakkâra.”
The reconquest of the North by Khâsekhemui doubtless led to a further strengthening of Memphis; and it is quite possible that the deeds of this king also contributed to make up the sum total of those ascribed to the Herodotean and Manethonian Menés.
It may be that a town of the Northerners existed here before the time of the Southern Conquest, for Phtah, the local god of Memphis, has a very marked character of his own, quite different from that of Khen-tamenti, the Osiris of Abydos. He is always represented as a little bow-legged hydrocephalous dwarf very like the Phoenician Kabeiroi. It may be that here is another connection between the Northern Egyptians and the Semites. The name “Phtah,” the “Opener,” is definitely Semitic. We may then regard the dwarf Phtah as originally a non-Egyptian god of the Northerners, probably Semitic in origin, and his town also as antedating the conquest. But it evidently was to the Southerners that Memphis owed its importance and its eventual promotion to the position of capital of the united kingdom. Then the dwarf Phtah saw himself rivalled by another Phtah of Southern Egyptian origin, who had been installed at Memphis by the Southerners. This Phtah was a sort of modified edition of Osiris, in mummy-form and holding crook and whip, but with a refined edition of the Kabeiric head of the indigenous Phtah. The actual god of “the White Wall” was undoubtedly confused vith the dead god of the necropolis, whose name was Seker or Sekri (Sokari), “the Coffined.” The original form of this deity was a mummied hawk upon a coffin, and it is very probable that he was imported from the South, like the second Phtah, at the time of the conquest, when the great Northern necropolis began to grow up as a duplicate of that at Abydos. Later on we find Seker confused with the ancient dwarf-god, and it is the latter who was afterwards chiefly revered as Phtah-Socharis-Osiris, the protector of the necropolis, the mummied Phtah being the generally recognized ruler of the City of the White Wall.
It is from the name of Seker that the modern Sak-kâra takes its title. Sakkâra marks the central point of the great Memphite necropolis, as it is the nearest point of the western desert to Memphis. Northwards the necropolis extended to Griza and Abu Roâsh, southwards, to Daslmr; even the nécropoles of Lisht and Mêdûm may be regarded as appanages of Sakkâra. At Sakkâra itself Tjeser of the IIId Dynasty had a pyramid, which, as we have seen, was probably not his real tomb (which was the great mastaba at Bêt Khallâf), but a secondary or sham tomb corresponding to the “tombs” of the earliest kings at Umm el-Ga’ab in the necropolis of Abydos. Many later kings, however, especially of the Vith Dynasty, were actually buried at Sakkâra. Their tombs have all been thoroughly described by their discoverer, Prof. Maspero, in his history. The last king of the Hid Dynasty, Snefru, was buried away down south at Mêdûm, in splendid isolation, but he may also have had a second pyramid at Sakkâra or Abu Roash.