ni. Illotory.—l. The foundation of the city is assigned to Menes, the first king of Egypt, head of the first dy- nasty (Herod, ii, 99). The situation, as already ob- served, is admirai)le for a cajiital of the whole country, and it was probably chosen willi that object. It would at once command the Delta and hold the key of Upper Egypt, controlling the commerce of the Nile, defended upon the west by the Libyan mountains and desert, and on the east by the river and its artificial embankments.
ion gives life and fertility to Egypt, was largely absorbed in the sands of the desert or wasted in stag- nant morasses. It is even conjectured that up to the time of Menes the whole Delta was an uninhabitable marsh. The rivers of Damascus, the Barada and 'Awaj, now lose themselves in the same way in the marshy lakes of the great desert plain south-east of that city. Herodotus informs us, upon the authority of the Egyp- tian priests of his time, that Menes, " by banking up the river at the bend which it forms about a hundred fur- longs south of Memphis, laid the ancient channel drj', while he dug a new course for the stream half-way be- tween the two lines of hills. To this day," he contin- ues, '• the elbow which the Nile forms at the point where it is forced aside into the new channel is guarded with the greatest care by the Persians, and strengthened ev- ery year; for if the river were to burst out at this place, and pour over the mound, there would be danger of Memphis being completely overwhelmed by the flood. Men, the first king, having thus, by turning the river, made the tract where it used to run dry land, proceeded in the first place to build the city now called Memphis, which lies in the narrow part of Egypt ; after which he further excavated a lake outside of the town, to the north and west, communicating with the river, which was it- self the eastern boundary" (Hcro<l. ii, 99). From this descrii)tion it appears that — like Amsterdam diked in from the Zuyder Zee, or St. Petersburg defended by the mole at Cronstadt from the Gulf of Finland, or more nearly like New Orleans protected by its levee from the freshets of the Mississippi, and drained by Lake Pont- chartrain — ^lemjdiis was created upon a marsh reclaimed by the dike of >ienes and drained by his artificial lake. The dike of ISIenes began twelve miles .south of Mem- phi.s, and deflected the main channel of the river about two miles to the eastward. Upon the rise of the Nile, a canal still conducted a portion of its waters west- ward through the old channel, thus irrigating the plain beyond the city in that <iirection. while an inundation was guarded against on that .side by a large artificial lake or reser\-oir at Abusir. The skill in engineering which these works re()uired, and- which their remains still indicate, argues a liigh degree of material civiliza- tion, at least in the mechanic arts, in the earliest known ]X'riod of Egyptian history. The manufactures of glass at Memphis were famed for the superior quality of their workmanship, with which Home continued to be sup- plied long after Egypt became a province of the empire.
MEMPHIS
IS
MEMPHIS
The environs of Memphis presented cultivated groves of the acacia-tree, of whose wood were made the planks and masts of boats, the handles of offensive weapons of war, and various articles of furniture (Wilkinson, iii, 92, 168).
Sir Gardner Wilkinson obsers'es, " The dike of Menes was probably near the modern Kafr el-Eiyiit, fourteen miles south of Mit-Eahlneh, where the Nile takes a considerable bend, and from this point it would (if the previous direction of its course continued) run immedi- ately below the Libyan mountains, and over the site of Memphis. Calculating from the outside of Memphis, this bend agrees exactly with the hundred stadia, or nearly eleven and a half English miles — iMit-Kahineh being about the centre of the old city. No traces of these dikes (sic) are now seen" (Rawlinson's Herod, ii, 163, note G). That the dike has been allowed to fall into neglect, and ultimately to disappear, may be accounted for by the gradual obliteration of the old bed, and the cessation of any necessity to keep the inundation from the site of Memphis, which, on the contrary, as the city contracted, became cultivable soil and required to be annually fertilized. But are we to suppose that IMenes executed the great engineeriug works attributed to him? It is remarkable that the higher we advance towards the beginnings of Egyptian history, the more vast are the works of manual labor. The Lake Moeris, probably excavated under the 6th dynasty, cast into the shade all later works of its or any other kind executed in Egypt. The chief pyramids, which, if reaching down to this time, can scarcely reach later, increase in importance as we go higher, the greatest being those of El-Gizeh, sep- ulchres of the earlier kings of the 4th dynasty. This state of things implies the existence of a large serf pop- ulation gradually decreasing towards later times, and shows that Menes might well have diverted the course of the Nile. The digging of a new course seems doubt- ful, and it may be conjectured that the branch which became the main stream was already existent.