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Updated: May 14, 2025
Looking south, past Memphis and the Pyramids of Sakkara and Darshūr, the Nile loses itself in the distant heat haze, while to the north is stretched before us the fertile plains of the Delta.
The Vth Dynasty favoured Abusîr, between Cîza and Sakkâra; the Vith, as we have said, preferred Sakkâra itself. 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 Fayyûm.
Later I was to see it grey as grey sands, sulphur color in the afternoon from very near at hand, black as a monument draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the stars at night, white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from the sand-dunes between it and Sakkara. But as a golden thing it greeted me, as a golden miracle I shall remember it. Slowly the sun went down.
Upon the stage then stepped the figures of this pair of human beings, chanting their ancient plainsong of incantation in the moonlit desert, and working their rites of unholy evocation as the priests had worked them centuries before in the sands that now buried Sakkara fathoms deep.
From the plateau on which these pyramids are built may be seen successively the pyramids of Abousīr, Sakkara, and Darshūr, and far in the distance the curious and lonely pyramid of Medūn. These are all built on the edge of the desert, which impinges on the cultivated land so abruptly that it is almost possible to stand with one foot in the desert and the other in the fields.
It is chiefly with regard to the sepulchres of the kings that the most momentous discoveries of recent years have been made at Thebes, and at Sakkâra, Abusîr, Dashûr, and Lisht, as at Abydos. For this reason we deal in succession with the finds in the nécropoles of Abydos, Memphis, and Thebes respectively.
Two prostrate statues of great size were seen on the way to the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, which is peculiar in that it is built with great offsets or steps, still plainly visible, although large quantities of the rock have crumbled and fallen down.
The talk flitted from topic to topic, mainly concerning itself with matters artistic, and never for one moment approaching the critical subject of John Bellingham's will. From the stepped pyramid of Sakkara with its encaustic tiles to mediaeval church floors; from Elizabethan woodwork to Mycaenaean pottery, and thence to the industrial arts of the Stone Age and the civilisation of the Aztecs.
Therefore it may be considered quite probable that the "Menés" who founded Memphis was Merpeba, the fifth or sixth king of the Ist Dynasty, whom Tunure, a thousand years before the time of Herodotus and his informants, placed at the head of the Memphite "List of Sakkâra."
Now after the piety of Seti I had led him to erect a great temple at Abydos in memory of the ancient kings, whose sepulchres had probably been brought to light shortly before, and to compile and set up in the temple a list of his predecessors, a certain pious snobbery or snobbish piety impelled a worthy named Tunure, who lived at Memphis, to put up in his own tomb at Sakkâra a tablet of kings like the royal one at Abydos.
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