Memphis, Egypt

• 1. Introduction

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  Memphis, the city the ancient Egyptians called Inebu-hedj, meaning "the white walls", stood for nearly four millennia as one of the most consequential places on earth. Its ruins lie today near the village of Mit Rahina, about 20 kilometres south of Cairo, and the site is open to visitors as an open-air museum. But the fragments visible there offer only a hint of what once existed. In the thirteenth century, the Arab chronicler Abd-ul-Latif visited the ruins and wrote that they held a half-day's journey in every direction, and that they offered a mass of marvels which bewildered the senses. What had made this city so formidable? How did it rise to become the capital of a united Egypt, the hub of a vast commercial network, and the sacred home of the god Ptah? And how did a city of such magnitude simply disappear, its stones hauled away to build other cities nearby? Those are the questions that draw archaeologists to the site today, and they are the questions this documentary will pursue.

• 2. A City of Many Names

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  Inebu-hedj was not always called Memphis. Over a history spanning close to four thousand years, the city accumulated names the way great cities accumulate neighborhoods, each name telling a different story about what the place meant to the people who lived there. The name Ankh-Tawy, meaning "Life of the Two Lands", appears to date from the Middle Kingdom, roughly 2055 to 1640 BCE, and it stressed the city's position at the boundary between Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Some scholars believe the name referred specifically to a western district lying between the great Temple of Ptah and the necropolis at Saqqara, a district thought to contain a sacred tree.

  At the start of the New Kingdom, around 1550 BC, the city took on the name Men-nefer, meaning "enduring and beautiful". That name passed into Bohairic Coptic as Memfi, and from there the Greeks shaped it into Memphis, the name history has kept. The Greek form actually derived from what the Greeks called the pyramid of Pepi I, located west of the city.

  The great temple at the city's heart carried a name that would travel even farther. Hut-ka-Ptah, meaning "Enclosure of the ka of Ptah", was rendered in Greek as Aigyptos. That rendering is believed to be the etymological origin of the modern English word Egypt. The poet Hesiod, in his Theogony, offered a different explanation entirely, saying that Memphis was a daughter of the river god Nilus, and that her husband Epaphus founded and named the city after her. The Bible refers to the same city as either Noph or Moph. The modern town of Mit Rahina may itself carry a trace of the ancient city; some scholars have connected its name to the ancient Egyptian phrase meaning "Road of the Ram-Headed Sphinxes", a reference to the causeway linking Memphis and Saqqara along which the sacred Apis bulls were carried for burial. Many Egyptologists reject that connection, pointing to the town's earlier recorded name, Minyat Rahina.

• 3. Foundation and Unification

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  According to the priest and historian Manetho, writing in the early third century BC during the Ptolemaic period, the city was founded by King Menes, the first ruler to unite the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt. Manetho's legend describes Menes diverting the Nile with dikes to reclaim the land on which he built his new capital. Herodotus, who visited the city when the Persians ruled Egypt, reported that the Persians of his day still maintained those dams carefully, because without them the city would flood each year.

  Whether Menes was a historical person or a legendary figure like Romulus of Rome remains debated. Some Egyptologists have identified him with the historical king Narmer, who appears on the Palette of Narmer conquering the Nile Delta. That palette has been dated to around the 31st century BC, which aligns with the legendary account of Egypt's unification. The identification ran into difficulty, however, when in 2012 an inscription was discovered in the Sinai depicting the visit of the predynastic king Iry-Hor to Memphis. Because Iry-Hor predates Narmer by two generations, Narmer cannot have founded the city.

  Whatever the precise identity of its founder, the first royal palace was attributed by Manetho to Hor-Aha, the successor of Narmer and the first king of the First Dynasty, who built a fortress of white walls at the site. The seat of power likely began somewhat south, at Thinis, before the king moved to Memphis to better control the newly unified kingdom. The funerary complex of Djoser of the Third Dynasty, built at the nearby necropolis of Saqqara, was the royal chamber for that dynasty, housing temples, shrines, ceremonial courts, palaces, and barracks.

• 4. The Golden Age of Ptah

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  The Fourth Dynasty marked the beginning of Memphis's golden age, a period when the city served as the royal residence where rulers received the double crown, the symbol of unified Egypt. Coronations and jubilee festivals known as the Sed festival were celebrated in the temple of Ptah. The earliest signs of such ceremonies appear in the chambers of Djoser, though it was under the Fourth Dynasty that the Memphite tradition truly consolidated.

  Ptah was the patron god of craftsmen and the creator deity, and the city believed itself to stand under his protection. The Memphis Triad consisted of Ptah, his consort Sekhmet the lion-headed goddess, and their son Nefertem. The great temple dedicated to Ptah occupied a central precinct in the city and was ranked alongside the great temples of Ra in Heliopolis and of Amun in Thebes as one of the three foremost places of worship in ancient Egypt. By the reign of Menkaura, in the Fourth Dynasty, records already preserve the names of the high priests of Memphis, who appear to have worked in pairs, at least through the reign of Teti of the Sixth Dynasty.

  The city reached its peak of prestige under the Sixth Dynasty as a centre for the worship of Ptah. During this time Memphis was not merely a capital but a true megalopolis. Necropoleis were surrounded by camps of craftsmen and labourers. Temples were connected by sacred precincts called temenos, and ports were linked by roadways and canals. The alabaster sphinx that guards the Temple of Ptah, still visible today, serves as one of the most direct reminders of the power the city held in that era. Its principal port, Peru-nefer, featured a high density of workshops, factories, and warehouses that distributed food and merchandise across the ancient kingdom.

• 5. Invasion, Revival, and Resistance

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  Around 1650 BC, the Hyksos invaded Egypt and captured Memphis. Many of the ancient capital's monuments and statues were dismantled and looted. The Hyksos kings carried pieces of the old city north to adorn their new capital at Avaris. The Theban kings of the Seventeenth Dynasty, who launched the reconquest roughly half a century later, left behind royal propaganda attesting to the struggle. The Eighteenth Dynasty opened with the Theban victory over the invaders, and kings such as Amenhotep II, who reigned from 1427 to roughly 1401 BC, and Thutmose IV, who succeeded him, gave renewed royal focus to Memphis even as the seat of power remained in the south.

  Thutmose IV received his recorded dream while residing as a young prince in Memphis. Later, the explorer Karl Richard Lepsius identified blocks and broken colonnades bearing his name to the east of the Temple of Ptah, remains most likely belonging to a ceremonial palace. Memphis also became in this period a centre for the education of royal princes. Amenhotep II, born and raised in Memphis, held the title of setem, the high priest over Lower Egypt, during his father's reign.

  The city's religious landscape grew more complex under Amenhotep III, who reigned from roughly 1388 to 1349 BC. His greatest work in Memphis was a temple called "Nebmaatra united with Ptah". His successor Akhenaten founded a temple of Aten in the city, attested by inscriptions found there. Tutankhamun, who reversed the Aten reforms, relocated the royal court from Akhenaten's capital back to Memphis before the end of the second year of his reign, and from there initiated a restoration of the temples and older traditions.

  Under the Persians, who took Egypt and Memphis for Persia's king Cambyses in 525 BC after the Battle of Pelusium, the city served as the administrative headquarters of the newly conquered satrapy. A Persian garrison was permanently installed, probably in the great north wall near the palace of Apries. For close to a century and a half Memphis remained the capital of the Persian satrapy of Egypt, known as Mudraya or Musraya. The Assyrian king Esarhaddon had already sacked the city in 671 BC, and a second, larger assault in 664 BC under Ashurbanipal ended Kushite rule over Egypt permanently. Each time, the city recovered, demonstrating a tenacity that reflected its strategic and religious irreplaceability.

• 6. Alexander, Ptolemies, and Decline

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  In 332 BC, Alexander the Great was crowned king in the Temple of Ptah, ushering in the Hellenistic period. When Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, his general Ptolemy secured the body and brought it to Memphis, claiming the king had wished to be buried in Egypt. Ptolemy had Alexander embalmed by the priests of Ptah and placed in the heart of the temple complex. By Macedonian custom, kings asserted their right to the throne by burying their predecessor. Ptolemy II later transferred the sarcophagus to Alexandria, where a royal tomb was built. The exact location of that tomb has been lost.

  The Ptolemaic rulers issued the Decrees of Memphis in 216 and 196 BC. Ptolemy IV and Ptolemy V respectively convened the principal clergy of the kingdom in synod under the patronage of the High Priest of Ptah. The delegates established religious policy, fixed fees and taxes, created new foundations, and paid tribute to their rulers. These decrees were engraved on stone stelae in three scripts: Demotic, hieroglyphic, and Greek. The most famous surviving stele from this series is the Rosetta Stone, which allowed scholars in the nineteenth century to decipher ancient Egyptian script.

  Despite such moments of ceremony, the Ptolemaic period was the beginning of Memphis's long withdrawal from the center of Egyptian power. Alexandria, facing the Mediterranean, served the needs of the new rulers far better than a city positioned at the mouth of the Nile Delta. The rise of the cult of Serapis, introduced by Ptolemy I and centered increasingly at the great Alexandrian Serapeum, drew religious energy northward. The Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, which made Nicene Christianity the sole religion of the Roman empire, completed the ruin of the ancient cults. Memphis was never again to become the nation's capital, and by the establishment of Fustat in 641 AD it was largely abandoned, its stones quarried to build the new Arab city. The foundations of both Fustat and later Cairo were laid in part with stones taken from the dismantled temples and necropoleis of Memphis.

• 7. Excavation and Recovery

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  The starting point of modern archaeological exploration at Memphis was Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt in 1798. French scientists accompanying the soldiers surveyed the site and published their findings in the monumental Description de l'Egypte, which included the first precise map to locate Memphis.

  The first excavations were carried out in 1820 by Caviglia and Sloane, who discovered the great limestone colossus of Ramesses II lying near the southern gate of the Temple of Ptah. The statue, about 10 metres in length, was found with its base broken off and is today displayed lying on its back in the open-air museum. Caviglia attempted to send it to Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II, and the Wali Muhammad Ali Pasha offered to donate it to the British Museum, but the museum declined because of the difficulty of shipping such a large object. The same year, Caviglia found a second colossus, which was restored in the 1950s to its full standing height of 11 metres and later moved in January 2018 to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum.

  Jean-Francois Champollion passed through Memphis on his Egyptian expedition from 1828 to 1830, described the colossus discovered by Caviglia and Sloane, and deciphered many of the epigraphic remains. He intended to return with more resources, but his death in 1832 ended those plans. Karl Richard Lepsius, during the Prussian expedition of 1842, produced the first detailed map of the ruins, which served as the foundation for all subsequent excavations.

  The most systematic excavations came from the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who worked the site from 1907 to 1912 and uncovered the pillared hall of the Temple of Ptah, the pylon of Ramesses II, the great alabaster sphinx, and the great wall north of the palace of Apries. Memphis and its necropolis, which include funerary rock tombs, mastabas, temples, and pyramids, were inscribed on the World Heritage List of UNESCO in 1979. Excavations continue at nearby Mit Rahina to this day, and a combined Russian-Belgian mission worked the great north wall as recently as 2003 and 2004.