Memphis

The archaic Egyptian name of the city, Inbw-ḥḏ, “White Walls,” written with the sign for a wall and the sign for “white.” It named the original fortified citadel of Memphis, traditionally founded by Menes at the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, its mud-brick ramparts whitewashed to gleam over the plain. The name is the oldest of the city’s, current in the Old Kingdom before Mn-nfr became standard, and it survived as the name of the first nome of Lower Egypt, of which Memphis was the capital.

Inbw-ḥḏ stands apart from the rest of this page: alone among the city’s names it never traveled abroad, leaving no exonym and no descendant in any other tongue. It is the purely Egyptian memory of how the capital began, a wall of white brick at the meeting-point of the Two Lands, a name that stayed home while Mn-nfr and Ḥwt-kꜣ-Ptḥ went out to furnish the world with the words Memphis and Egypt.

The cult-name of the great temple of Ptah at Memphis, Ḥwt-kꜣ-Ptḥ, “Mansion of the ka of Ptah,” used by extension for the city around the temple. Ptah was Memphis’s creator-god, patron of craftsmen, and the temple of his ka, his vital essence, was among the most important sanctuaries in Egypt. The name is written with the signs for the ḥwt-enclosure, the kꜣ, and the god Ptah, and it stands beside Mn-nfr and Inbw-ḥḏ as one of the city’s several names.

This is the name with the most extraordinary afterlife on the page, though its descendant does not name the city at all. The prevailing etymology derives the Greek Aígyptos from Ḥwt-kꜣ-Ptḥ: Greek traders meeting Egypt through its Memphite capital are thought to have taken the temple’s cult-name, reshaped it phonetically, and applied it to the entire country, whence Latin Aegyptus and the English Egypt. A single temple at Memphis thus gave its name, by way of Greek, to a whole civilization; the form that names the land of Egypt belongs, at its source, on the page for one of its cities. The descendants of Ḥwt-kꜣ-Ptḥ are gathered under the entry for Egypt itself, in the Aígyptos family.

The lasting Egyptian name of the city, Mn-nfr, “enduring and beautiful.” It began as the name of the pyramid-complex of the Sixth Dynasty king Pepi I, Mn-nfr-Ppy, “the beauty of Pepi endures,” and the town that grew around it lent its name to the whole capital from the Middle Kingdom onward. Written with the signs mn and nfr and closed by the town determinative, it appears throughout Egyptian administrative, religious, and monumental texts as the standard name of the city.

Mn-nfr is the headwater of nearly every foreign name for Memphis. Through its later spoken form, something like Menfe, it became Coptic Memfi, Akkadian Mempi in the mouths of the Assyrian conquerors, the Hebrew prophets’ Nōph and Mōph, the Arabic Manf of the ruined site, and, through Greek, the Memphis that the modern world uses. A pharaoh’s pyramid-name, meant to promise that one king’s beauty would endure, did endure, becoming the name by which his capital is remembered five thousand years on.

The Hebrew name for Memphis as it appears in the book of Hosea, Mōph, with the initial m that stands closer to the Egyptian Menfe than the more common Nōph does. Hosea, the eighth-century prophet of the northern kingdom, warns that Israelites fleeing destruction will be gathered by Egypt and buried in Mōph, the great necropolis-city of the south; the verse is the form’s single occurrence.

Mōph and Nōph are the same name twice over, a rare doublet within Biblical Hebrew that captures the borrowing in mid-fluctuation between m and n. Hosea’s Mōph keeps the original initial consonant of Menfe; the later prophets’ Nōph shifts it. That one city should sit in the Hebrew Bible under two spellings, neither quite the Egyptian and neither quite the other, is a small monument to how unsteadily a foreign name can settle into a new language.

The usual Hebrew name for Memphis, Nōph, a shortened reflex of the late Egyptian Menfe in which the initial syllable has dropped away. It appears in the prophets, who name Memphis among the cities of Egypt that will share in Egypt’s coming judgment: Isaiah, Jeremiah, who locates Judaean exiles there, and Ezekiel, who foretells the destruction of its idols. The initial n for an expected m reflects the instability of nasals in the borrowing.

Nōph is the more common of the Bible’s two names for the city, the form used everywhere except Hosea. Standing in the prophetic oracles against Egypt, it carries the same freight as the other great foreign capitals of scripture, a heathen city marked for downfall; and it sits beside its own variant Mōph on this page as evidence that even within one language the worn-down Egyptian name had not quite settled on a single shape.

The Akkadian name for the city, Mempi, written URU.me-em-pi in the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings who conquered Egypt. Esarhaddon took Memphis in 671 BCE, driving out the Kushite pharaoh Taharqa and carrying off his family, and his son Ashurbanipal sacked it again; their royal annals record the capture of Mempi, “his royal city,” in some detail. The form renders the late Egyptian Menfe into Akkadian syllables.

Mempi is the city’s name in the mouth of its briefest and most violent foreign master. Assyria held Memphis only a dozen years, but its scribes left the name in cuneiform on monuments of conquest, an independent witness to the same spoken Menfe that the Greeks and Hebrews were hearing at the same time. It is the one form on this page recorded not by traders or translators but by an army.

The Demotic form of the city’s name, Mnfy, the late stage of Mn-nfr as Egyptian itself evolved, with the original two-word compound worn down to a single word of roughly two syllables, Menfe. It is written in the Demotic script, the cursive shorthand of the first millennium that has no usable Unicode representation. The form is current in the documentary and literary Demotic of the Late, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods.

Mnfy is the bridge between the ancient Mn-nfr and the foreign forms that cluster around it. It is roughly this spoken Egyptian shape, no longer “enduring and beautiful” to any ear but simply the name of the city, that the Greeks heard as Memphis, the Assyrians as Mempi, and the Hebrews as Nōph. The elaborate pharaonic compound had by now become an ordinary place-name, which is exactly why it could travel so easily.

The Greek name for the city, Memphis, adapted from the late Egyptian Menfe (Egyptian Mn-nfr). Herodotus, who claims to have visited, gives the fullest early account of the city under this name: its temple of Ptah, which he calls the temple of Hephaestus, its founding by Min, and its sacred Apis bull. The Greek form, with its familiar -is ending, became the standard name of the city in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean and is the form English inherited.

Memphis is the form that won. Of all the reflexes of Mn-nfr, it is the Greek one, carried by Herodotus and the Hellenistic world and fixed by Latin, that became the city’s name in every modern language. It also stands in instructive contrast to the city’s other gift to Greek: where Mn-nfr gave Greek Memphis, the name of the city, the Memphite temple-name Ḥwt-kꜣ-Ptḥ gave Greek Aígyptos, the name of the country. One capital furnished the Greek language with the names of both the city and the land, by two different words.

The Imperial Aramaic name of the city, Mnpy, the form Memphis takes in the Aramaic papyri of Achaemenid Egypt, where Aramaean soldiers, traders, and officials lived in and around the old capital and wrote of it in the chancellery language of the Persian empire. The spelling reflects the contemporary pronunciation of Egyptian Mn-nfr as something like Menfe, the same late form that lies behind Greek Memphis and Hebrew Mōph; an assimilated variant mpy also occurs.

Mnpy is Memphis seen through the most widely written language of its own day. While the Egyptian priesthood still carved Mn-nfr and Ḥwt-kꜣ-Ptḥ in hieroglyphs, the working population of Persian-period Egypt named the city in Aramaic, the lingua franca that carried business and administration from the Nile to the Oxus. The Aramaic form thus catches the Egyptian name at the very moment it was passing into the shape the rest of the world would keep, Mn-nfr already worn down to the Menf- that every later language inherited.

The Latin name for the city, Memphis, taken over unchanged from the Greek. Pliny describes it in his survey of Egypt; the adjective Memphītis and the related Memphīticus became literary commonplaces for “Egyptian,” as in Virgil’s Memphis of the fertile Nile. Latin received the city under the Greek form and passed it westward without alteration.

Memphis is the western terminus of the city’s own name, the form by which medieval and modern Europe knows the ancient capital. It completes a transmission that began with a Sixth Dynasty pyramid called “enduring and beautiful” and ran through Demotic, Coptic, and Greek to reach Latin, and through Latin the languages of Europe. The city’s name endured, exactly as its founding pharaoh’s monument had wished, though by a route he could never have imagined.

The Syriac name for the city, Mefes, as the Peshitta renders Memphis where the Hebrew has Mōph, in Hosea’s warning that Egypt will bury the fugitives of Israel. The Syriac form carries the final -s of the Greek Memphis rather than the bare Hebrew Mōph, showing that here the Peshitta, or the tradition behind it, reached for the familiar Greek shape of the name instead of simply transcribing the Hebrew before it.

Mefes is a small but telling departure from the usual pattern. Elsewhere on these pages the Syriac Old Testament follows the Hebrew closely, as with Ur and Erech; here, for a city the Greek-speaking world knew well, it takes the Greek form instead. The choice marks Memphis as a place too famous to need translating from the Hebrew: even in Syriac, it was simply Memphis.

The Coptic name of the city, Memfi (Bohairic; Sahidic Menfe), the final native-Egyptian form of Mn-nfr, written now in the Greek-derived Coptic alphabet. It is the name as Egyptian Christians spoke it in Late Antiquity, when Memphis was still inhabited and the Coptic church recorded its bishops; the vocalization is directly attested in the Coptic vowel letters rather than reconstructed.

Memfi is the living end of the Egyptian line, the city’s own name in the last stage of its own language, three thousand years after Inbw-ḥḏ. From this Coptic form, or its spoken antecedent, the Arabic Manf was taken when Arabic replaced Coptic on the ground. The entry marks the point where the native name, having passed through hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Coptic, hands the city over to the language that names it still.

The Arabic name for the city, Manf (also Manūf, Mīt Manf), taken from the Coptic Memfi of the Egyptian Christians whom the Arab conquest found in possession of the name. By the time it is well attested, Memphis was a ruin, and the geographers describe Manf as the wrecked ancient capital south of Fusṭāṭ whose stones were quarried to build the new Islamic cities; its site is the modern village of Mīt Rahīna.

Manf is the city’s name come to rest. Through it the Mn-nfr of Pepi I survives, worn down across four thousand years and five languages to a single Arabic syllable-cluster, attached now to a field of fallen colossi. Of the names that the capital sent into the world, Memphis kept its grandeur in the books of Europe while Manf kept its place on the ground, the last native form of a name that began as a promise of endurance.