Egypt Guide
The Pyramids
Memphis
Opening time: Garden daily 8am–4pm
Price: £E30, students £E15
Most tour excursions to Saqqara include a flying visit to the scant remains of Memphis in the village of MIT RAHINA. Sadly, these hardly stir one's imagination to resurrect the ancient city effaced over centuries by Nilotic silt, which now lies metres below rustling palm groves and oxen-ploughed fields. Although something of its glory is evident in the great necropolises ranged across the desert, and the countless objects in Cairo's Egyptian Museum, to appreciate the significance of Memphis you have to recall its history.
The city's foundation is attributed to Menes, the quasi-mythical ruler who was said to have unified Upper and Lower Egypt and launched the I Dynasty around 3100 BC. At that time, Memphis was sited at the apex of the Delta and thus controlled overland and river communications. If not the earliest city on earth, it was certainly the first imperial one.
Alas for posterity, most of this garden city was built of mud-brick, which returned to the Nile silt whence it came, and everyone from the Romans onwards plundered its stone temples for fine masonry. Nowadays, leftover statues and steles share a garden with souvenir kiosks. The star attraction, found in 1820, is a limestone Colossus of Ramses II, similar to the one that used to stand in Midan Ramses, but laid supine within a concrete shelter. A giant alabaster sphinx weighing eighty tons is also mightily impressive. Both these figures probably stood outside the vast Temple of Ptah, the city's patron deity.
By leaving the garden and walking back along the road, you'll notice (on the right) several alabaster embalming slabs, where the holy Apis bulls were mummified before burial in the Serapeum at Saqqara. In a pit across the road are excavated chambers from Ptah's temple complex; climb the ridge beyond them and you can gaze across the cultivated valley floor to the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.