Description: Predating Thebes / Luxor,
Memphis was capital of Lower Egypt, and once was situated at the very apex of the Nile delta. Yet Memphis is no
Luxor. Nothing remains of this, the world’s first imperial city. Its glories have been buried beneath century after century of Nile sediment. Some tresures have been unearthed and carted off to museums. Some statues remain in situ in the fenced off and tree-shaded area that comprises the ‘archaeological site’. For LE30 the trip is not worth it.
Memphis is located in the village of Mit-Rahina, on the Nile side of the irrigation canals, and so is greener than the stark plateau of the pyramids. It is also much busier – coach parties were disgorged into queues that I had not seen at
Saqqara or
Dahshur.
So what is there to see? Well, the only true jewel is a giant statue of… guess who? Yep, Ramses II. Inside a prefabricated warehouse-style affair the pharoah lies flat on his back, carved from a smooth creamy limestone. Clearly he was once striding forward vigorously, though with a more kindly smirk on his face than I had previously seen at
Karnak and
Abu Simbel.
Other statues dot the grounds. Smaller Ramseses, a grinning alabaster Sphinx. But my judgement is that you can easily bypass Memphis, a location with so little to offer that it has to use an image of the Saqqara step pyramid as the image on the official Department of Antiquities ticket!
If the mud-brick houses of Memphis dissolved back into the Nile from whence they had come, and the masonry was pillaged by later rulers, the route back to Cairo was able to reveal scenes of life that might not have changed substantially in two millenia. Donkeys were tethered outside mud-brick huts amongst the palms, old men in gellabiyyas chewed sugar cane, another rode a donkey so laden down with canes that all that could be seen of it was four legs and two ears. Bracketted between the irrigation canals and the river, here was a timeless Egypt, just half an hour south of one of the biggest and most bustling metropolises in the world. Yet, I reflected, as once more the Giza Pyramids danced like a mirage on the western horizon, even in Cairo there are geleabiyyas and head-scarves alongside the designer jeans and Sean John tops, horse-drawn carts and air-con BMWs travelling on the same road. Maybe the universes are not parallel after all, but tandem. Cairo is that rarest of places where Pharoahs, Romans, popes and imams all coexist alongside each other.
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