The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos
'Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there.' When he entered the country the civilisation and monarchy of Egypt were already very old. The pyramids had been built hundreds of years before, and the origin of the Sphinx was already a mystery. Even the great obelisk of Heliopolis, which is still the object of an afternoon drive to the tourist at Cairo, had long been standing in front of the temple of the Sun-god.
The monuments of Babylonia enable us to fix the age to which Abraham belongs. Arioch of Ellasar has left memorials of himself on the bricks of Chaldaea, and we now know when he and his Elamite allies were driven out of Babylonia and the Babylonian states were united into a single monarchy "This was 2350 B.C.
The united monarchy of Egypt went back to; a far earlier date. Menes, its founder, had been kin^ of This (or Girgeh) in Upper Egypt, and starting from his ancestral dominions had succeeded in bring- ing all of Egypt under his rule. But the memory of ar earlier time, when the valley of the Nile was divided into two separate sovereignties, survived to the latest age of the monarchy.
Up to the last, the Pharaohs of Egypt called themselves ' kings of the two lands,' and wore on their heads the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. The crown of Upper Egypt was a tiara of white linen, that of Lower Egypt a throne-like head-dress of red. The double crown was a symbol of imperial power. To Menes is ascribed the building of Memphis, the capital of the united kingdom. He is said to have raised the great dyke which Linant de Belle- fonds identifies with that of Kosheish near Kafr el- Ayyat, and thereby to have diverted the Nile from its ancient channel under the Libyan plain. On the ground that he thus added to the western bank oi the river, his new capital was erected. Memphis is the Greek form of the old Egyptian Men-nefer or ' Good Place.'
The final rwas droppec in Egyptian pronunciation at an early date, and in The Patriarchal Age 3 thus arose the Hebrew forms of the name, Moph and Noph, which we find in the Old Testament,
while ' Memphis ' itself — Mimpi in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria — has the same origin. Another name by which it went in old Egyptian times was Anbu-he, ' the white wall,' from the great wall of brick, covered with white stucco, which surrounded it, and of which traces still remain on the northern side of the old site. Here a fragment of the ancient fortification still rises above the mounds of the city ; the wall is many feet thick, and the sun-dried bricks of which it is formed are bonded together with the stems of palms.