Memphis

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The largest object at the site is a man on his back. He is carved from a single block of limestone, more than ten meters from crown to broken knee, and he lies inside a low building put up around him because he is too heavy to raise and too valuable to leave in the field. The face is intact: the wide brow, the long nose, the faint smile of official portraiture. The legs end below the knee, snapped off in some collapse no record preserves. This is Ramesses II, who ruled for sixty-seven years and meant the statue to stand at the gate of a temple so that the living would look up at him forever. It lies in a shed at Mit Rahina, a village of mud-brick houses and date palms south of Cairo, and almost nothing else of the city he built it for is visible above the ground.

The recumbent colossus of Ramesses II at the Mit Rahina open-air museum, the surviving heart of ancient Memphis; the statue once stood at the southern gate of the temple of Ptah. — Photograph via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons).

The White Wall

Egypt is a long country with a narrow heart. The Nile runs north through a valley a few miles wide for most of its course, and then, near the latitude of modern Cairo, the valley opens. The river splits into branches and spreads across a fan of fertile land to the Mediterranean — the Delta, Lower Egypt, the kingdom of the north. Above the split lies the valley proper, Upper Egypt, the kingdom of the south. The two have different landscapes, different emblems, different crowns, and for the whole of recorded Egyptian history their union was the central political fact, the thing every king claimed to embody: Lord of the Two Lands. Memphis stood at the hinge. It was built at the apex of the Delta, on the west bank, at the precise point where the south meets the north — the place from which both could be governed at once.

The founding tradition is preserved by Manetho, the Egyptian priest who in the third century BCE wrote a history of his country for the Greek-speaking world. He credited the city to Menes, the king who first united Upper and Lower Egypt into a single realm around 3100 BCE, the figure modern scholars often identify with the Narmer of the earliest monuments. The tradition holds that Menes diverted the river itself, raising a dyke to push the Nile aside and reclaim the ground on which the city would stand. Whether one king named Menes did all of this is beyond recovering; an inscription found in 2012 shows the predynastic ruler Iry-Hor present at the site two generations before Narmer, so the place was already in use when the unification tradition gathered around it. What is firm is that from the First Dynasty onward Memphis was the seat from which a unified Egypt administered itself, and that it kept that role, through interruptions, for most of three thousand years.

Its first name was a description of how it looked. Inebu-hedj meant “the White Walls” — the fortress of whitewashed mud-brick that held the royal residence and the treasury, a bright rampart visible across the floodplain. Later the city took the name of a nearby pyramid-town built for the burial of the Sixth-Dynasty king Pepi I: Men-nefer, “enduring and beautiful,” the name of the king’s pyramid extended to the settlement that served it. Men-nefer became Menfe in Coptic, the last form of the Egyptian language, and the Greeks, hearing it, said Memphis. The name that the world remembers is the name of a tomb.

But the deepest name belonged to the god. The great sanctuary at the center of the city was Hut-ka-Ptah, the Mansion of the ka of Ptah — the house built for the soul of the creator. So vast and so defining was this temple that its name appears to have traveled outward and become the name of the whole land. The Greeks, reaching for a word for the country, said Aigyptos; from Aigyptos descends, by a long phonetic drift, the English Egypt. The derivation is the one most Egyptologists favor, and it is a strange and fitting thing if it holds: that a nation took its name from a single building, the house of a god’s soul in his city of the White Wall.

The house of the maker

What made Memphis a holy place rather than merely a capital was Ptah, and what Ptah was understood to have done is among the most remarkable claims any ancient priesthood advanced. The doctrine survives, in its fullest form, on a single slab of dark stone now in the British Museum — the Shabaka Stone, ordered carved by a Kushite pharaoh of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty near the end of the eighth century BCE, who said he had found the text decaying in the temple and copied it into stone to preserve it. The composition it carries is called the Memphite Theology.

It teaches that the world was made by thought and word. Most Egyptian cosmogony was physical: at Heliopolis, the rival sun-city a short way north, the god Atum brought the first divine pair into being from his own body, by spitting or by his hand, and from that pair unfolded the great Ennead, the nine gods of the visible order. The Memphite priesthood did not deny this. It enclosed it. In their account Atum and his Ennead are real but not first; first is Ptah, and the Ennead exists in him, the text says, as the teeth and lips exist in a mouth. Where Atum created with seed and hand, Ptah creates by the heart and the tongue.

In Egyptian thought the heart, not the brain, is the seat of mind — the organ where intention forms and judgment resides. The tongue is the organ that gives the heart’s conception an outward and effective form. So creation runs inward to outward: the eyes see, the ears hear, the nose breathes, and all of it reports to the heart; the heart shapes the completed thought; the tongue pronounces it; and the thing exists. In Miriam Lichtheim’s translation the text declares that “there took shape in the heart, there took shape on the tongue the form of Atum” — that even the first god of the rival city is a thing conceived in Ptah’s heart and spoken by his tongue. The cosmos is not built. It is thought, and then named. To exist is to have been first an idea in the divine mind and then a word on the divine tongue.

A god who creates by conceiving in his mind and uttering with his word stands close — close enough that readers have not been able to leave it alone — to a doctrine that would rise far to the north and centuries later: the divine Word through which all things are made, the Logos of the opening of the Gospel of John, in the beginning with God, by which all things come to be and without which nothing is made that is made. The resemblance is exact at the level of structure. It must be held carefully. There is no documented line of transmission from a slab in a Memphite temple to the Word-theologies of late antiquity, and the parallel is read by scholars as genuinely contested — a recurrence of an idea, not a proven descent. What the two share is an intuition: that the deepest kind of making is not manual but mental and verbal. Egypt arrived at it early and stated it with a precision that later traditions, in other languages, would reach again.

This was no abstraction kept among priests. Ptah’s older identity was that of the craftsman, the patron of the sculptors and metalworkers and masons whose hands made the visible glory of Egypt, and his high priest at Memphis bore the title Greatest of the Directors of Craftsmen — master of every guild in the land. The maker who conceived the universe in his heart was, on the human scale, the god of everyone whose work was to see a shape and then realize it in stone. It is no accident that the most famous of Memphis’s own sons was an architect. Imhotep, the vizier who raised the first pyramid for King Djoser at nearby Saqqara, was venerated in the city as a son of Ptah, and over the long centuries was raised from a remembered genius to a healing god — the figure the Greeks would later identify with their own Asclepius.

The god was also present in the temple as a living animal. In a stall within the sanctuary stood the Apis bull, a single black bull marked with particular white signs, recognized at Memphis as the living manifestation of Ptah, the breathing image of the god who had spoken the world. The bull gave oracles. The people came to consult it. When it died, the search began at once for its successor, born somewhere in Egypt and bearing the right marks, while the dead bull received the rites of a god.

The catacomb of the bulls

The alabaster sphinx of Memphis, carved in the Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1700–1400 BCE) and uncovered by Flinders Petrie in 1912 near the enclosure of Ptah. — Photograph via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons).

The dead Apis bull was carried west, across the river plain and up onto the desert escarpment, to Saqqara — the necropolis of Memphis, the city of the dead that served the city of the living for the whole of its long life. There the bulls were buried in a place the Greeks called the Serapeum, a name compounded from Osiris and Apis: the dead Apis, like the dead king, became one with Osiris, lord of the dead. The burial place was a system of rock-cut galleries running underground, begun in the New Kingdom — the main gallery is credited to Ramesses II — and enlarged by later kings into a long subterranean corridor lined with vaulted side-chambers.

Into each chamber was lowered a sarcophagus for one bull, and the sarcophagi are enormous: cut from single blocks of granite and basalt, polished, lidded, some of them weighing on the order of sixty tons. The animals were mummified with the care given a god and sealed in these stone boxes, one after another, century after century. The galleries, lost for centuries, were rediscovered at Saqqara in 1850 and the catacomb of the bulls opened the following year — dozens of the great sarcophagi standing in their chambers, many emptied by ancient robbers, a few still sealed. To walk the corridor now is to pass between stone boxes large enough to hold a small room, each made to receive the body of an animal that had been, while it lived, the soul of the creator walking in the temple.

A granite Apis sarcophagus in the Serapeum of Saqqara, the necropolis of Memphis; each was cut from a single block and weighs on the order of sixty tons. — Photograph via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons).

This was the rhythm of the sacred city: the god conceived in the heart and spoken by the tongue at the center of Memphis, present as a living bull in his stall, and carried at his death up to the desert to lie in stone among his predecessors. Around that center the city was a working capital — the residence of kings through the Old Kingdom, a great commercial port on the river even when the court moved to Thebes in the south, a place where the temples of many gods stood beside the mansion of Ptah, and where the embalmers of the Apis worked at tables of alabaster that still lie in the field, the long slabs grooved to carry away the fluids of the dead bull. Memphis was where Egypt began and, for most of its history, where it was largest.

The sinking of the city

Nothing ended Memphis at a stroke. It was undone slowly, by the shifting of weight away from it. When Alexander’s general Ptolemy made Alexandria his capital on the coast at the end of the fourth century BCE, the center of gravity of Egypt moved to the sea, to the Greek city with its harbor and its library, and Memphis began the long descent from first city to provincial town. The river itself worked against it; over centuries the Nile shifted its bed eastward, drawing the waterfront away from the old quays and burying the lower city under the silt of its annual floods. When Christianity rose, the temple of Ptah lost its reason; the Apis was not replaced, the oracle fell silent, the priesthood that had taught creation by the word dispersed.

Then the city was carried off in pieces. After the Arab conquest in the seventh century, the new town of Fustat rose just to the north — the seed of what became Cairo — and Memphis became a quarry. Its dressed stone, its temple blocks, its statues were dragged across the river to build the new capital, as builders have always done with the convenient ruins of the old. The medieval physician Abd al-Latif, visiting around 1200, still described ruins so extensive that crossing them took half a day, and marveled at colossal statues and monolithic shrines; but the carrying-off continued, and the floods kept rising, and the palm groves of Mit Rahina spread over the ground. By the modern era the greatest city of the ancient world had become a scatter of mounds and broken stone among the fields, its plan unreadable, the White Wall gone entirely back to mud.

What is left is what was too large to move. The fallen colossus of Ramesses II, uncovered by the Italian traveler Giovanni Caviglia in 1820, lies in its shed where it dropped. The alabaster sphinx of the Eighteenth Dynasty, found by Flinders Petrie in 1912, sits nearby in the open air. There are the embalming tables of the Apis, a smaller standing statue of Ramesses, fragments of the great temple’s gates, all gathered into a modest open-air museum around which the village goes on with its ordinary life. The ruins of the old capital are protected today within the World Heritage listing that joins Memphis to its necropolis along the desert edge — the city of the living and its long city of the dead recognized together.

It is an odd fate for the place where, the priests taught, everything began with a thought and a word. The temple whose name may have become the name of Egypt cannot now be found beneath the soil; the god who spoke the world is known from a stone that spent part of its life as a millstone. And yet the doctrine kept its precision down the centuries — that to make is first to conceive and then to name — and a visitor standing over the broken face of Ramesses, in the quiet of the palm grove, is standing on the ground from which a unified Egypt was first governed, and where its oldest theology held that the heart conceives and the tongue calls into being.

→ Related: Ptah · Saqqara · Imhotep · The Ennead · The Egyptians · Ancient Egypt · The Egyptian Priesthood · Thebes · Abydos · Heliopolis · Atum · Ra · Osiris · Sekhmet · Hathor · Maat · Duat · Ka Egyptian Soul · Ba Egyptian Soul · Weighing Of The Heart · Opening Of The Mouth · Serapis