Origin of calling the city by Mit Rahina

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According to an ancient Egyptian religion, Memphis was considered one of the important religious centers.  It is the main center of worshiping the mummified god Ptah, one of the great gods of Egypt associated with the creation of the world order and craftsmen.  The god Ptah sometimes, like the god Ra, was represented in the sacred bull Apis.  The Memphis inhabitants also were worshiped the triad of god Ptah which consist of himself, his wife lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, the desert, storm and pestilence goddess, and their child god Nefertum. (Wilizinson, 2001, p. 83)

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This earliest capital took a lot of names along historical eras.  During the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom, it called by inbw-HD, which means "the white walls or fortress", Hwt-KA-PtH which means "the Mansion of the Soul of god Ptah".  Then, during the sixth dynasty, it known Men-Nefer the name of the pyramid and the mortuary temple of King Pepy I.  But by the time, when the Greeks come to Egypt and found their colonies, they call it by the name Memphis.

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There are numerous names by other language such as Moph or Noph in the Biblical Hebrew.  Also fortunately, an ancient Egyptian name survived as same as the name Manf in Mediaeval records by Arabic language.  But unfortunately, all of these names changed during the modern time.  The name of an ancient town Memphis turns to Mit Rahina through the modern accent of the Egyptian villagers.

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"The earth of Memphis has valuable organic qualities. Known as Sebakh, it was much sought after for fertilizer through mediaeval and modern times until the establishment of the Egyptian Antiquities Department (now Organization) in 1890."

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The Historical Background of an Ancient Town

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After the fifth century B.C, the earliest capital Memphis mentions by the classical writers and historians such as Herodotus, Strabo and Diodorus.  Memphis founds, within the beginnings of the old kingdom, by King Hor-Aha (or probably King Menes (Narmer)) during the first dynasty (3000 – 2920 B.C). 

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The king takes this location as to be the capital of Egypt after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt.  So, according to some scholarships, Memphis was the center of an ancient civilization, the centralized government, and also the trades spot.  It locates near the apex of the Delta controlling all major routes for internal trade as well as foreign commerce.  And then, during the Middle kingdom especially during the reign of King Amenhotep II that it remained as a religious and commercial center.

 

A lot of information gets from the inscribed blocks of stone which were reused in later monuments.  For example, a block with a Middle Kingdom inscription was reused by King Ramses II, for the base of a statue, who also usurped at least one block from a monument built by his ancestor King Amenhotep III in his small temple of god Ptah.  

 

In the New kingdom, it was the principal seat of the government, as well as a training camp of the Egyptian military forces and a cosmopolitan river port.  So, the most of monuments, which excavated in Mit Rahina, come back to the New Kingdom.  For the divine Ptah of Memphis, King Amenhotep IV (known as Akhenaten, the heretical king) builds a temple at Memphis for the worship of the solar disk god Aten.  Also, King Ramses II has a lot of structures in the site. (Oxford Ency., vol. II, p. 373; Kamil, 1985, p. 26, 27, 30)

During the Late period, "Memphis was visited by merchants and traders.  It was as a place of refuge.  During the reign of King Apries, Jewish exiles from Jerusalem were received there. Fifty years later, during the reign of King Amasis, Ionian and Carian mercenaries and refugees from Babylon were settled in special quarters.  Memphis had become Egypt's most cosmopolitan city.  It combined a strong local identity based on deep-rooted traditions with a remarkable absorptive capacity to tolerate other people' diverse beliefs and practices."

When the Ptolemies started to found their new capital Alexandria, they remained on an earliest capital Memphis that stills as a religious capital.  "According to Diodorus, the coronation rituals were still erect at the temple of god Ptah till the reign of King Ptolemy VIII, about 140 B.C."

 

The actual destruction of the original Memphis started with the latter period of the Roman occupation of Egypt (30 B.C. - 640 A.D.).  Romans used cement as a building material while many of the monuments, built of limestone, were destroyed and burned for lime content.  Then, with the edict of Emperor Theodosius (395 A.D.), when Christianity was declared to be the official religion, paganism was actively forbidden.  So, Memphis did not except from the wave of destruction that swept over the land that all of walls were plastered over and monuments converted into Christian monasteries and churches.

 

This greatest city neglected so much after the Arab conquest of Egypt.  Arabs also complete the destruction activities, after the Roman period, especially with the founding of the Fatimid capital Cairo in 969 A.D.; Memphis was used as a quarry.  Blocks of granite, marble and Egyptian alabaster were s tripped from surviving monument.

 

Excavation, Conservation and Documentation Projects

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In the 16th century, Memphis was identified by Francois de Pavie and, later, by the European travelers that its location and identity remained a matter of debate, however, until established the Commission of the French expedition in 1799.  The commission carried out the first fieldwork at the site, which was limited to mapping, measuring, and in some cases removing the few monumental statue fragments then visible above ground.

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Major excavations were subsequently took place by the French scientist Jean-Francois Champollion and Ippolito Rosellini (1828), the German Archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius (1843), Joseph Hekekyan (1852 – 1854), Auguste Mariette (1857 – 1862).  "In 1890, the French scholar Grebaut conducted a dig which resulted in the discovery of royal statues of the Fourth and Fifth dynasties, along with a large granite solar bark; these are in the Cairo Museum."(Kamil, 1985, p. 27, 29; Jeffreys, 2001, p. 373)

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During the research operation, there was the great cooperative role of the supreme council of antiquities with the foreign excavation missions.  So, I abled to see the reports of the excavation missions by Arabic Language, which worked in the archaeological site, in the archive of museum.

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The actual excavation projects start with the British School of Archaeology in Egypt by W. M. Flinders Petrie (1907 – 1914).  The archaeologist Petrie was the first one who started to excavate the great temple of god Ptah.  He finds out that King Ramses II used much of the Old Kingdom stones in Saqqara and Giza Plateau in the construction of the base of temple and its walls.

This project discovered the alabaster sphinx now in the Museum Compound, more than two hundred stelea which come back to the eighteenth dynasty, blocks of some amulets to various Egyptian gods and goddesses such as god Ptah, goddess Isis, and god Bes and beside, some statues for the scribes who lived the reign of King Amnophis III. 

 

Petrie also could excavate the precincts of the main Ptah Temple Complex especially the eastern gate, of the great temple of god Ptah, which founded during the Ptolemaic period and some ruins of the Apries palace.  He found out three main structures including a gate or portico, a palace and a temple of Merenptah on Kôm el Qala'a.

 

Through the report of Petrie, he could use the brief descriptions of ancient authorities Herodotos, Diodoros and then Strabo about the facial feature of an ancient Egyptian capital Memphis such as several different parts of the great temple of god Ptah, besides the first building of the temple is attributed to King Menes.  He draw topographical map of the ancient archaeological map which mainly copied from the drawing map of the German archaeologist Lepsius.

 

The British archaeologist talked in his book about the working of King Ramses II in Ptah temple.  In the nineteenth dynasty, in front of the temple, King Ramses II placed two statues of thirty cubits of himself and his wife, and others of his four sons, each of twenty cubits.  One of these is doubtless the well-known colossus, the place of which is marked on the map.  Also, King Ramessu III built a new temple in the court, of granite below and limestone above, and its doorways of granite.  He made a shrine of granite containing the triad of god Ptah, goddesses Sekhmet and Nefertum. (Petrie, 1909, p. 2, 3, pl. I and II.; Mit Rahina Inspectorate Register, SCA, 1908)

 

"The University Museum of Pennsylvania, under Clarence Fisher, took over the excavation of the Palace of Merenptah for two seasons, 1915-1919 and 1921-1923, and found, among the structures, the most well-preserved throne room to have survived of a pharaoh of the New Kingdom. The palace appeared to have been burned soon after the pharaoh's death, but fortunately enough material survived to enable a scale reconstruction, in the University Museum of an exceptional monument." (Kamil, 1985, p. 31)

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The Expedition of the Pennsylvania University Museum by Rudolph Anthes (1955 – 1956), with contribution by Ibrahim Abdel Aziz, Hasan S. K. Bakry, Henry G. Fischer, Labib Habachi, and Jean Jacquet.  The excavation devoted to clearing a small area at the southwest corner of the enclosure wall of the great temple of god Ptah.  In clearing the area around the sanctuary of King Ramses II, the expedition discovered three tombs, two of which are dated to the later reign of the New Kingdom, while the date of the third remains in doubt. (Lichtheim, 1961, p. 71-72)

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Since 1980, the site has been at the heart of a regional survey by the Egypt Exploration Society.  Firstly, this mission was started to work in Ptah temple that cleaning the temple from grass and pumping out the subterranean water (Aquifer).  It exits the monuments as to photograph and document while other monuments buried again to keep on from a hygroscopic and the impacts of nature such as rain and humidity. 

 

Secondly, it worked in the northern and western parts.  Through the studying of the pottery shreds, they could know the old kingdom level.  They discovered an impression made from mud brick which to have inscription come back to the fifth dynasty.  This mission could excavate some blocks which own the inscriptions of cartouche and two statues of King Ramses II.  One of them finds in Mit Rahina Museum while the other one was put in Ramses Square and then transferred to the court of the New Egyptian Museum in El Rimaia Square.(Mit Rahina Inspectorate Register, SCA, 1987)

 

In 1981-1983, the team, of Survey of Memphis Project under Harry Smith and under the directorship of David Jeffreys and Lisa Giddy of the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), mapped the disparate city ruins and reconstructed the ancient environment, particularly the movement of the river.

 

This project intended to declare Memphis as a protected area under the newly-formed Egyptian Environmental Agency (EEA).  The long term goal of the project was to ensure that Memphis will exist epigraphically, stratigraphically and historically for the generations to come.  In their excavations at Kom Rabia‘, southeast of Kom El Fakhry, the project documented two distinct phases of the city: a priestly quarter of the New Kingdom and an artisan quarter of the late Middle Kingdom.

 

In 1983, the survey moved to north Memphis and located two Roman early Christian sites and also a port area dating to the Roman era.  The discovery of the port was particularly important because, despite the wealth of documentary evidence that the course of the river Nile transferred eastward and that the ancient city probably followed the receding river.

 

In 1984, the EES started to excavate at Kôm Rabia, between the Middle Kingdom tombs and settlement and the New Kingdom structures that it discovered a settlement with indication of two phases of occupation, late eighteenth dynasty and early nineteenth dynasty, which to have the character of domestic and industrial. Also, these included stone vessels like a rough limestone spinning bowl.  The excavated pottery is mostly New Kingdom, but includes some later Saitic pottery. (Kamil, 1985, p. 31; AERAGRAM, 2012, p. 2)

 

Since 2000, the Portuguese mission started to work in the location along five years (3/2000, 4/2001, 10/2002, 4/2008, and 4/2009) especially in Kom Toman, the Apries palace, Kom Om El Tom and Tell El Aziz.  It draw the topographical maps to the location generally, to observe the general condition of the palace and to dig in the northern corner around and of the palace. (Mit Rahina Inspectorate Register, SCA, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2008, and 2009)

 

In 1941, the department of Antiquities[1] conducted a survey of Mît Rahîna area and decreased the level of aquifer by digging a ditch.  This season could discover by Ahmed Badawi and Mustafa el Amir a small temple dedicated to Ptah, southwest of the main temple of god Ptah, which comes back to the reign of king Ramses II and also to north of the main road, the huge alabaster beds and four small alabaster altars, inside the southwestern corner of Ptah Temple, which by the scholars of the old historians, probably to be the embalming house of the sacred Apis Bulls. (Kamil, 1985. p. 25)

 

There was a great role for the supreme council of antiquities during the excavation projects that in 1970, the temple of goddess Hathor by Inspector Mr. Abdallah El Said and then, in 1998, to the west of the embalming house, they find out the mud brick room which comes back to the Coptic period beside some Osirid bronze statues. (Mit Rahina Inspectorate Register, SCA, 1970)

 

In 1982, the Apis House project, the United States funded project, supported financially by the Dimick Foundation of Washington DC through the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, under the direction of archaeologists Michael and Angela Jones.  The working of the project is oriented among a study of the standing architectural remains and new excavations.  

 

The project could excavate the embalming house of the Apis Bull which debris contains pottery and artifacts datable to the Old Kingdom, New Kingdom, the Third Intermediate period, and the Late period like the demolished remains of an earlier structure within scribed blocks bearing the names of the twenty sixth dynasty Kushite King Shabaka whose monument King Psamtik II had usurped.

 

"In 1983, Jocelyn Berlandini, working for the French Foreign Ministry's Department of Scientific Research in collaboration with Labib Habachi, began the complete documentation of the Chapel of Seti I." (Kamil, 1985. p. 31, 32)

 

In 2010, the Russian archaeological mission started to investigate the previous studies of the site that excavated, near the Apries palace, some ovens which prepared to melt the metals beside some faience shreds.  All of these come back to the late period especially the twenty sixth till thirtieth dynasties.  Also, it could find out some pottery vessels which some return back to the late period and other to the Greco-Roman period. (Mit Rahina Inspectorate Register, SCA, 2010)

 

In the endings of 2011, Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and Egypt Exploration Society (EES) collaborated on an archaeological Mit Rahina Field School (MRFS).  This field school excavates a settlement and cemetery remains in the oldest part of Memphis, Kom el-Fakhry where to have the oldest in situ remains at Memphis.  Cemetery dated to the First Intermediate Period while a settlement dated later to the Middle Kingdom.  But to the north of Kom el-Fakhry, on the southern edge of the Mit Rahina village mound, they recorded the old Kingdom sherds. (AERAGRAM, 2012, p.2-7)

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[1] The Egyptian Antiquities Service, then later called the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, then the Supreme Council for Antiquities, and nowadays the ministry of Antiquities. 

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The Archaeological Character of the Site

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The Minor Museum of Colossal Statue of King Ramses II

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In 1820, the Italian and British scholars Caviglia and Sloane found a monumental statue of King Ramses II.  Mohammed Ali Pasha presents it as gift to the British people but it did not transfer.  It is now in the Museum Compound.  Its feet and the back are much-eroded by water.(Kamil, 1985, p. 30)