Memphis (of ancient) Eygpt
It may be that a town of the Northerners existed here before the time of the Southern Conquest, for Phtah, the local god of Memphis, has a very marked character of his own, quite different from that of Khen-tamenti, the Osiris of Abydos. He is always represented as a little bow-legged hydrocephalous dwarf very like the Phoenician _Kabeiroi_. It may be that here is another connection between the Northern Egyptians and the Semites. The name "Phtah," the "Opener," is definitely Semitic. We may then regard the dwarf Phtah as originally a non-Egyptian god of the Northerners, probably Semitic in origin, and his town also as antedating
the conquest. But it evidently was to the Southerners that Memphis owed its importance and its eventual promotion to the position of capital of the united kingdom. Then the dwarf Phtah saw himself rivalled by another Phtah of Southern Egyptian origin, who had been installed at Memphis by the Southerners. This Phtah was a sort of modified edition of Osiris, in mummy form and holding crook and whip, but with a refined edition of the Kabeiric head of the indigenous Phtah. The actual god of "the White Wall" was undoubtedly confused vith the dead god of the necropolis, whose name was Seker or Sekri (Sokari), "the Coffined." The original
form of this deity was a mummied hawk upon a coffin, and it is very probable that he was imported from the South, like the second Phtah, at the time of the conquest, when the great Northern necropolis began to grow up as a duplicate of that at Abydos. Later on we find Seker
confused with the ancient dwarf-god, and it is the latter who was afterwards chiefly revered as Phtah-Socharis-Osiris, the protector of the necropolis, the mummied Phtah being the generally recognized ruler of the City of the White Wall.
It is from the name of Seker that the modern Sak-kera takes its title. Sakkera marks the central point of the great Memphite necropolis, as it is the nearest point of the western desert to Memphis. Northwards the necropolis extended to Griza and Abu Roesh, southwards, to Daslmr;
even the necropoles of Lisht and Medem may be regarded as appanages of Sakkera. At Sakkera itself Tjeser of the IIId Dynasty had a pyramid, which, as we have seen, was probably not his real tomb (which was the great mastaba at Bet Khallef), but a secondary or sham tomb
corresponding to the "tombs" of the earliest kings at Umm el-Ga'ab in the necropolis of Abydos. Many later kings, however, especially of the Vith Dynasty, were actually buried at Sakkera. Their tombs have all been thoroughly described by their discoverer, Prof. Maspero, in his history. The last king of the Hid Dynasty, Snefru, was buried away down south at Medem, in splendid isolation, but he may also have had a second pyramid at Sakkera or Abu Roash.
The kings of the IVth Dynasty were the greatest of the pyramid builders, and to them belong the huge edifices of Griza. The Vth Dynasty favoured Abuser, between Ceza and Sakkera; the Vith, as we have said, preferred Sakkera itself. With them the end of the Old Kingdom and of Memphite dominion was reached; the sceptre fell from the hands of the Memphite kings and was taken up by the princes of Herakleopolis (Ahnasyet el-Medina, near Beni Suef, south of the Eayyem) and Thebes. Where the Herakleopolite kings were buried we do not know; probably somewhere in the local necropolis of the Gebel es-Sedment, between Ahnasya and the Fayyem. The first ThePublish Postbans (the XIth Dynasty) were certainly buried at Thebes, but when the Herakleopolites had finally disappeared, and all Egypt was again united under one strong sceptre, the Theban kings seem to have been drawn northwards. They removed to the seat of the dominion of those whom they had supplanted, and they settled in the neighbourhood
of Herakleopolis, near the fertile province of the Fayyem, and between it and Memphis. Here, in the royal fortress-palace of Itht-taui, "Controlling the Two Lands," the kings of the XIIth Dynasty lived, and they were buried in the necropoles of Dasher, Lisht, and Illahun (Hawara), in pyramids like those of the old Memphite kings. These facts, of the situation of Itht-taui, of their burial in the southern an ex of the old necropolis of Memphis, and of the fori of their tombs (the
true Upper Egyptian and Thebian form was a rock-cut gallery and chamber driven deep into the hill), show how solicitous were the Amenemhats and Senusrets of the suffrages of Lower Egypt, how anxious they were to conciliate the ancient royal pride of Memphis.
