MEMPHIS

map of Memphis and its cemetery

The city of Memphis, which has now disappeared almost completely, was the administrative and religious center of the 1st Lower Egyptian nome. It was the royal residence and capital of Egypt during the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom, and many later Kings maintained a palace there. The city’s temples were among the most important in the land. Memphis always remained one the most populous and renowned places of Egypt and, indeed, of the whole ancient world, inhabited by a workshops played an important part in Egypt’s foreign trade.
A reflection of the size and importance of Memphis is the stretch, more than 30 km long, covered by its cemeteries, on the edge of the desert on the west bank of the Nile. These together from the Memphite necropolis:(1) Dahshur, (2) Saqqara, (3) Abusir, (4) Zawyet el-Aryan, (5) Giza, (6) Abu Rawash. Administratively, Giza, and Abu Rawash were already in the 2nd nome of Lower Egypt.
The names by which the various parts of the Memphite necropolis are now known derive from the name of modern villages nearby. Egyptians themselves had no special term for the whole necropolis, but a number of ancient Egyptian place names which used to be applied to its various parts are known, such as Rasetau ( probably southern Giza ). The most conspicuous features of the necropolis, the royal pyramids, sometimes lent their names to the adjacent quarters of the city which had grown out of the original “ pyramid towns” of priests and pyramid officials. One of these terms, the name of the pyramid of Pepy I at Saqqara, Mennufer , Coptic Menfe, and  Memphis in its Grecized from, was adopted as early as the 18th Dynasty to describe the whole city.
The town itself, or whatever may remain of its palaces, temples and houses, is to be sought in the cultivated area to the east of the necropolis , buried under the deposits of silt left behind by Nile inundations, and covered by modern settlements, fields and vegetation. So far only small parts have been revealed ay Mit Rahina and Saqqara ( east of the pyramid of Teti). The position of the city, or at least of its center , probably did not remain stable throughout Egyptian history, new thriving areas gaining in importance to the dertriment of others whose popularity had waned. This must have been once reason for the very long expanse covered by the city’s cemeteries, though undoubtedly there were others, such as the search for suitable sites for the large-scale  projects of building pyramids. Our modern concept of the city of Memphis and of its shadowy counterpart, the Memphite necropolis. Is therefore very artificial, because neither of them ever existed completely at any one time.
Classical sources as well as archaeological discoveries show that Memphis became on of the most important administrative centers of the country at the very beginning of Egyptian history, After 2920BC. Herodotus says that it was Menes, the traditional first King of Egypt, who raised a dike to protect the city from the inundations of the Nile.
According to Manetho the successor of Menes, called Athothis, was the builder of the earliest of the palaces of Memphis. The oldest name of the district was Ineb-hedj, “ The white wall “ possibly reflecting the appearance of its fortified residence to which it could also be applied. Perhaps the most apt was the term which appeared in the Middle Kingdom, Ankh-tawy, “ That which Binds the Two lands, “ stressing the strategic position of the town at the tip of the economically important delta, between lower and Upper Egypt of the traditional terminology. This , indeed, was probably the reason why the rulers of the 1 st Dynasty chose the area for the site of the capital.
 Only Thebes in the south was comparable in religious, political and economic importance to Memphis, yet our Knowledge of the remains of this truly national shrine of Egypt is infinitely smaller.
For foreigners Memphis  represented Egypt.
According to some scholars, the name of one of its New Kingdom temples and of the neighboring quarters of the city, Hikuptah ( “The Temple of the ka of path “), gave rise to the name of the name of the whole country, Greek Aigyptos and our Egypt. This is also the etymology of the word “Coptic.”
The city of  Memphis did not survive the gradual eclipse of ancient Egyptian civilization in the early centuries of our era. Economically, it suffered even earlier from the growth of Alexandria. Its religious importance was lost when Theodosius I (379-95 AD) decreed that Christianity should be the religion of the whole of the Roman Empire. The final coup de grace was delivered in 641 AD, when the Muslim conqueror Amr ibn el-Asi founded anew capital of Egypt, el-Fustat, on the east bank of the Nile at the south end of modern Cairo.

Source: Baines and Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, 1995