Who ruled Memphis?

Memphis was the first capital of a united ancient Egypt. Its ruins lie on the west bank of the Nile around the village of Mit Rahina, about 20 kilometres south of Cairo in Egypt, at the point where the river valley opens into the delta. The royal city of the Old Kingdom and a great centre of the god Ptah for some three thousand years, it was gradually eclipsed by Alexandria and Cairo, and its stones were carried off to build them.

Ancient tradition, recorded by the priest Manetho in the third century BCE, credited the founding of the city to Menes, the first king of a united Egypt, who was said to have diverted the Nile with dykes to make room for it. Some Egyptologists have identified Menes with the historical king Narmer, while others think he may be mythical; a carving found in Sinai in 2012 records a visit to Memphis by an earlier king, Iry-Hor. The city's original name, Inebu-hedj, means "the white walls", and its later Greek name derives from Men-nefer, the name of the pyramid of the Sixth Dynasty king Pepi I.

Kings ruled from Memphis from the First Dynasty onwards, and it remained the capital through the Old Kingdom. Their tombs spread for more than 30 kilometres along the desert edge to the west, from Saqqara, where the funerary complex of the Third Dynasty king Djoser stands, to the Pyramids of Giza. Coronations and jubilee festivals were held in the temple of Ptah, called Hut-ka-Ptah, a name that Greek speakers rendered in a form believed to be the origin of the word "Egypt". Population estimates differ widely: Tertius Chandler suggested about 30,000 people, while K. A. Bard proposed nearer 6,000 for the Old Kingdom.

In the Middle Kingdom the court moved south to Thebes, but Memphis remained a leading centre of trade and craftsmanship. Around 1650 BCE the Hyksos captured it and carried many of its monuments to their capital at Avaris. Under the New Kingdom the city prospered again as a port trading with Byblos and the Levant and as a place where princes were educated. After Akhenaten's experiment with the worship of the Aten, the young king Tutankhamun moved the court to Memphis and began restoring the old temples. Ramesses II filled the city with colossal statues of himself, and many of the ruins visible today belong to his dynasty.

The Kushite ruler Piankhi took Memphis and founded the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. The Assyrian king Esarhaddon captured and sacked the city in 671 BCE, and in 664 BCE Ashurbanipal's armies sacked it again, ending Kushite rule in Egypt; see the Assyrian conquest of Egypt. After a revival under the Saite kings, the Persian king Cambyses took Memphis in 525 BCE, and for about a century and a half it served as the seat of the Persian province of Egypt, with a permanent garrison. Native dynasties regained independence from 404 BCE, but in 340 BCE Artaxerxes III besieged Memphis and Persian rule returned.

Alexander the Great was crowned in the temple of Ptah in 332 BCE. After his death, Ptolemy I brought Alexander's body to Memphis before it was moved to Alexandria. Under the Ptolemaic Kingdom the city kept great religious prestige: the priestly decrees issued there included the one inscribed on the Rosetta Stone. Its political and commercial importance, though, passed to Alexandria.

Under Roman rule, and with the spread of Christianity, the old cults faded and the city dwindled. After the Arab conquest of the seventh century, its temples became quarries for the new capital at Fustat and later for Cairo. The Baghdad scholar Abd al-Latif still marvelled at the extent of the ruins in the thirteenth century.

Jean de Thévenot identified the site in 1652, and scholars with Napoleon's expedition mapped it at the end of the eighteenth century. Giovanni Caviglia found a colossal limestone statue of Ramesses II in 1820, now displayed lying on its back in the site museum; a second colossus of the king stood in a central Cairo square for about fifty years before moving to the Grand Egyptian Museum in 2018. Flinders Petrie's excavations of 1907 to 1912 uncovered much of what can be seen today, including the alabaster sphinx. Memphis and its necropolis were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979.