One of the first depictions of an Egyptian king is found on a macehead,[92] where the king is apparently opening a breach in a dike with a hoe, next to a man who is filling a basket with dirt. This king, called the Scorpion King from the ideogram on the mace — head, is said to have lived around 3200 BC. This is the period during which writing first appeared in Egypt, and also a time of growing political unity between upper and lower Egypt.
Development of the capital Memphis
Herodotus visited Egypt in 460 BC when it was under Persian domination. He reports (on the basis of information from priests) that a king called Min (Menes) built the new capital of unified Egypt, called Memphis, at the border between the upper and lower
portions. The construction of large dikes consummated the establishment of this city:
“The Egyptian priests say that Min, who was the first king of Egypt, dammed off this place of Memphis from the Nile. For the whole river flowed close by the sandy mountain that is toward Libya, but Min, damming up the southern bend of it, about a hundred furlongs south of Memphis, dried up the ancient channel and channeled the river to flow through the middle of the mountains. Even to this day this bend of the Nile is most heedfully observed by the Persians, that it may flow in its confined course, and every year the barriers are built up again. For if the river should break out at this point, there would be a danger that all Memphis would go down in the flood. When Min, this first king, had made the cut-off part into dry land, he founded within it the city that is now called Memphis — for Memphis, too, lies in this narrow part of Egypt — and, outside it, he dug a lake away from the river to the north and west (for the Nile itself was the barrier toward the east), and he founded within the city the temple of
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Hephaestus, which is indeed a great one and exceedingly worth telling of.” °
Who is this Min? He is very likely the first identifiable Pharaoh, Menes or Narmer, who probably reigned between 3150 and 3125 BC[93] [94]. The dike he constructed at Memphis has been the subject of some speculation. Considering the difficulty of blocking a river like the Nile (and especially considering that this work would have been accomplished at the very beginning of the history of Egypt), it seems very unlikely that it was a true dam. Herodotus, who is considered to be a reliable witness, is careful to distinguish between what he sees and what he is told. He sees the dike, and he can see that it is maintained. It seems plausible that Memphis was founded by draining swampy land, perhaps in an abandoned branch of the Nile, and by then building the dike some twenty kilometers upstream to protect these drained lands from flooding. This dike had to be a dozen meters or so high, this being the height of the largest floods at Memphis.
The port of Memphis is without doubt the greatest in Egypt. It is thought to have been on the left bank, embedded in the valley of a wadi that flows along the edge of the plateau. The port is nearly a kilometer long and 200 to 300 m wide. It is connected to the Nile by a canal extending to the north along the edge of the plateau, providing access to the cultural and funereal sites of Saqqarah.[95] [96]
