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Now Manetho, after his dynasties of gods and demi-gods, states that thirty Memphite kings reigned for 1,790 years, and were followed by ten Thinite kings whose reigns covered a period of 350 years. Neglecting the figures as obviously erroneous, we may well admit that the Greek historian here alludes to our two pre-Menite dynasties.
Those so-called Hyksos monuments may be the products of a local school, the origin of which may have been independent, and its traditions quite different from the traditions of the Memphite workshops. But except at Abydos, El Kab, Asûan, and some two or three other places, the provincial art of ancient Egypt is so little known to us that I dare not lay too much stress upon this hypothesis.
These four attitudes were customary among the people from the time of the ancient empire. Hathor-cow in green basalt. This we know from the bas-reliefs. But the Memphite sculptors, deeming the two last ungraceful, excluded them from the domain of art, and rarely, if ever, reproduced them.
Each had its chapel; but those chapels stood far away in the plain, at Gûrneh, at the Ramesseum, at Medinet Habû; and they have already been described. The Theban rock, like the Memphite pyramid, contained only the passages and the sepulchral chamber.
According to Manetho, the kings of the Hid Dynasty are the first Memphites, and this seems to be quite correct. With Ne-maat-hap the royal right seems to have been transferred to a Memphite house.
There was something of melancholy in his voice as he desired his young camel-driver to pick up the flowers, which now lay in the dust of the road, and to bring them to him. He himself had observed the handsome youth as, with a glance and a gesture of annoyance with himself, he flung the innocent gift on the hot, sandy highway. "Your brother is right," cried the old man to the Memphite.
In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the cold wind that blew outside, and the physiognomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of horror that were awaiting us above had vanished from our mind. Sinister as it is under a blue sky, this desert becomes absolutely intolerable to look upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when the daylight fails.
The Memphite and Theban temples, which preceded this by so many centuries, and far surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in consequence of the falling of the enormous granites of their roofs, their cherished gloom, and, what is the same thing, their religious mystery.
The temple of Isis, the "Lady of the Pyramid," contained a dozen such images; and this temple was not one of the largest in the Memphite necropolis.
The rock-cut tomb did not, however, attain its full development until the times of the last Memphite kings and the early kings of the Theban line. In these rock-cut tombs we find all the various parts of the mastaba.
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