No number of honors, however, could save the Ptolemies from the rising power of Rome. The hungry Roman Empire’s swift fleets and disciplined army made Egypt, with its temptingly large agricultural surplus, an easy plum to pick. The fourteenth and most famous ruler of the Ptolemaic line, Cleopatra VII Philopator, used all her wiles to hold off the growing challenge. Her affair with Julius Caesar worked to Egypt’s benefit for a time. After his murder, Cleopatra gambled on an alliance with the rebellious Roman general Marc Antony, and lost. With her lover’s fall at the Battle of Actium, the last queen of an independent Egypt knew she was doomed. Cleopatra sealed herself in a tower and pressed the poisonous asp of lore to her throat. Octavian—later Emperor Augustus Caesar—captured Alexandria, extinguished the Ptolemies, and declared Egypt his personal possession.
At about this time Diodorus Siculus visited Memphis, which he described as having a circumference of seventeen and a half miles. A century later Strabo said that Roman Memphis remained large and populous and was “inhabited by mixed races of people.” He judged the Temple of Ptah (which he associated with the Roman Vulcan or Greek Hephaestus) to be very sumptuously constructed. The former palaces were, however, in ruins.
Modern archaeology corroborates the ancient geographers. Ptolemaic remains on the east bank of the Nile show that Memphis had expanded enough for its suburbs to take root across the river, where the Arab capitals of Egypt were later to grow. Drill core samples taken from Memphis’s own vast, sunken ruin field have exposed Roman-era vestiges outlining a city the shape and size of Manhattan. Roman Memphis may have stretched for twelve miles along the west bank of the Nile, reaching right up to the outskirts of the modern district of Giza.
But three slow-motion calamities were to stifle the ancient capital during the Roman era. Instead of installing a garrison at Memphis itself, Augustus housed his legions on the opposite bank of the Nile. Later emperors built a major fortress just downstream, at a site facing the northern suburbs of Memphis. This was called Per-hapi-on, which in Egyptian meant the River House of On—that is, the port of Heliopolis. Babylon, as the Romans mispronounced the place—making it easy to confuse with the Mesopotamian city—not only commanded an easy river crossing by way of the island of Roda, it also straddled a canal which linked to waterways that the later pharaohs had cut to the Red Sea. A city of camp followers soon grew up at this strategic spot, and commerce began to drift away from Memphis.
Just as old money and power abandoned the city, so did the old religion. The emperor Augustus had dismissed the Memphites’ customs as folly. How could they, he sneered, worship cattle? Roman disdain took concrete form in the expropriation of all the temple estates that had paid the salaries of Egypt’s priesthood. In other ways the new rulers were tolerant. Some temples were restored and some cults were promoted—the Egyptian goddess Isis, for instance, became popular throughout the empire. But Egypt’s old religion, being based on the idea that the pharaoh was man’s link to the gods, with the priests being merely his representatives, could hardly thrive when the pharaoh/emperor was a Latin-speaking foreigner living in Rome and didn’t take his godly role very seriously.
The decline of old ways helped Christianity to gain an early foothold in Egypt. Not only was the new religion considered subversive by the Romans—which made it attractive in the eyes of Egyptian nationalists—but also much of its imagery merged comfortably with Egyptian beliefs: the infant Jesus with the child Horus, Isis with the Virgin Mary, the death of Osiris with the martyrdom of Christ, the symbol of the ankh or Key of Life with the cross. Nor did it hurt that the Holy Family was said to have passed through Egypt on its flight from King Herod, tracing a trail of future Egyptian pilgrimage sites that included Heliopolis and a spot on the now fashionable east bank of the Nile, just opposite Memphis.
Still, Christianity’s hold was not, at first, very firm. Mark the Evangelist, Egypt’s great missionary and patron saint, may have been martyred at Alexandria in A.D. 63 for preaching against the adoration of the Apis bulls at Memphis, yet the traveling Roman emperor Hadrian remarked in a letter home from Egypt in A.D. 134 that he had seen “those who call themselves bishops of Christ devoting themselves to Sarapis.”
By the end of the second century, however, the ancient cults were expiring. Their priesthoods slowly dispersed. Christianity began making such rapid inroads that the alarmed Romans mounted a series of persecutions in which 144,000 Egyptian Christians are said to have perished. The trauma was so ghastly that the Coptic Christian calendar begins in A.D. 284—the inaugural year of the emperor Diocletian, who was credited with the worst excesses. But the terror produced a backlash. Within seven years of Diocletian’s death the Roman emperor Constantine had himself converted to the new religion and moved the seat of the empire to Byzantium. By the Coptic year 103, fanatic monks under orders from Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria had stormed and desecrated the last of Egypt’s pagan temples, probably including that of Ptah at Memphis.
Finally, and most irreversibly, the gods of nature themselves abandoned Memphis. Like a restless snake, the Nile shifted a mile eastward in its bed, leaving the port of Bon Voyage high and dry. The whole Delta pushed north, so that the branching of the river was now several miles downstream from the ancient capital, closer to the Romans’ Babylon. Old dikes that had long protected the city fell into disrepair, and the softened mud of the valley floor began to swallow its gracious stone structures whole.
By the time the Arabs arrived in A.D. 640 under the banner of Islam, Memphis was little more than a ghostly shadow of the thriving garrison town on the opposite bank. Babylon, not Memphis, was the seat of an important bishopric. It was the fall of Babylon after a seven-month siege that marked the fall of Christian Egypt. And it was here, outside the walls of the Roman fortress, that the Arabs established their capital—their commander, Amr ibn al-‘As, had preferred the sumptuousness of Alexandria’s abandoned palaces, but his master, the caliph Omar, had recognized the strategic importance of Cairo’s site. The conquerors called the new city Misr al Fustat, and as it grew and prospered, the name of poor Memphis devolved first into Old Misr and then was forgotten altogether.
Notwithstanding the vast size of this city and its great age, and in spite of the efforts by various nations to wipe out its most minute traces by shipping away the stones and materials of which it was built, by wrecking its buildings and mutilating the images with which they were adorned…still its ruins present a combination of wonders that confound the understanding. The more the whole is considered, the greater the admiration it inspires. Contemplating these vestiges of antiquity, a thoughtful man is disposed to forgive the error of the vulgar who believe that the ancient mortals who constructed them were gigantic in stature, or that they could make stones obey their commands by striking them with a wand.
Imagine the eloquent doctor’s dismay were he to see the site today, because the last few centuries have proved the cruelest of all. Aside from its spectacular desert necropolis, there is practically nothing left of Memphis itself. Undulating earthen mounds, a colossal statue of Ramses II, a few other choice rocks, and the faintest traces of the great walls of the Temple of Ptah are all that mark the spot. The city’s ancient foundations lie sixteen feet underground, which is to say in the swampy and corrosive underworld below the water table. And now even the lush palm groves that shade the whole vast site are under threat. As Cairo swells, walls of apartment blocks are advancing on Memphis. The cliffs of stone, and indeed the whole mineral element, seem set to triumph over the green of the valley.
HOW FAR THE mighty have fallen. And even the less mighty. Leaving the Muqattam stonecutters to their work and plunging back into the squawking jungle of al-Khalifa’s animal market, one can’t help thinking how much better some of these caged creatures would have fared if only they had lived a few thousand yea
rs ago.
The monkey on his chain, for instance, might have spent his days mooning around some temple at Memphis, coddled, pampered, and revered as a living incarnation of Thoth. On his death he would have been expensively embalmed and mummified. His name, place of birth, date of burial, and a prayer for his salvation would have been written on his coffin, which would have been carried in procession to the Catacombs of the Sacred Baboons at Saqqara. There he would have lain in comfort until tomb robbers or Egyptologists found him.
At Memphis, falcons, bulls, cats, and even dogs were maintained in style as living images of beast-headed gods. It was not only Apis bulls that were venerated in life and death, but also their mother cows. Two full years of preparation were required before a dead holy cow could at last be sent to the underground Resting Place of the Mothers of Apis at Saqqara, mummified and beautified with a gilded face mask. As for the sacred ibis birds, archaeologists have given up exploring the extremities of their catacombs, because they are simply too vast: multiple passages 30 feet wide and 165 feet long are packed from floor to ceiling with pottery jars of bird remains. The whole undertaking quarter of Memphis—the priests and bearers, the oil boilers, spice blenders, pitch and cartonnage makers, linen weavers, painters, writers and illustrators of funerary texts, amuletmakers, and so on—must have worked overtime for centuries to stock these vaults with their bizarre contents of an estimated 2 million bird mummies.
The city’s animal afterworld has suffered a cruel decline since the end of paganism. For people it has not been so bad. Standards never again rose to the height of pyramids. In fact, as early as 1000 B.C. the unwary or illiterate risked being swindled by the sleazier morticians of Memphis, who cheated by painting coffins with bogus glyphs instead of proper instructions from the Book of the Dead. (The fakes looked like modern forgeries—just like the hieroglyphic gobbledegook churned out by the souvenir industry, in fact. The puzzled archaeologists who found them wondered at first if someone had played a practical joke on them.)
But you could still obtain a decent mummification in 450 B.C.: Herodotus says the undertakers displayed wooden models of three grades of mummy. Impressed by the chemical ingenuity of the Memphites, the curious Greek spared no detail in his description. Having ghoulishly elaborated a first-class mummification, he continued:
When, for reason of expense, the second quality is called for, the procedure is different: No incision is made and the intestines are not removed, but oil of cedar is injected with a syringe into the body through the anus, which is afterward stopped to prevent the liquid from escaping. The body is then pickled in natron*7 for the prescribed number of days, on the last of which the oil is drained off. The effect of this is so powerful that as it leaves the body it brings with it the stomach and intestines in a liquid state, and as the flesh, too, is dissolved by the natron, nothing of the body is left but the skin. After this treatment it is returned to the family without further fuss.
It is a relief to find that the mummy-munching Europeans of later times were not quite so cannibalistic as one may have feared. In fact, scientists believe that the extraordinary state of preservation shown by the mummies on display at the Egyptian Museum owes as much to the dry desert climate as to feats of chemistry. The Egyptians’ preoccupation with death did, however, secure a kind of immortality. The tomb reliefs at Saqqara and Giza, with their scenes of farming and industry and worship, have enabled scholars to conjecture about the fine minutiae of working life in Memphis: how beer was brewed and wine pressed; how linen was manufactured; how fashions in clothing and hairdressing changed; how keelless ships were built and bronze was smelted; and what games and musical instruments were played.
After Herodotus, Memphis’s undertaking industry sank into serious decline. Its last important client was the thirty-three-year-old Alexander the Great. His body sojourned there for fifty years before being sent—properly pickled, one presumes—to the great city he had founded on the coast. Grand-scale tomb-building slowly petered out after Alexander. The Greek and Roman elites who mastered the country had more modest funeral habits than the natives, indulging in fine portraiture of the dead rather than tomb construction. (The Egyptian Museum boasts an unrivaled collection of these superb and eerily lifelike Fayoum Portraits.) Then, when Christianity took hold, all the old customs were renounced. The Egyptian Church cultivated an image of fierce asceticism. Saintliness in its eyes was achieved by spurning the luxuries of the imperial court at Byzantium, by never washing or eating, by holing up in a desert cave, by wearing coarse garments, and certainly not by splurging on your tomb.
Still, some of the old habits must have lingered. Soon after they brought the new religion of Islam to Egypt, the Arabs found it necessary to ban funeral practices they saw as excessive, such as the hiring of professional mourners. Then, following an uprising by the Coptic Christians, who still made up the majority of Egyptians two centuries after the Muslim conquest, the Caliph al-Mutawakkil punished the rebels with discriminatory laws. Infidels were henceforth forbidden the use of horses. They were obliged to wear distinguishing clothes as a mark of shame. The strictures were enforced with varying severity. But one punishment—perhaps the most severe of all in the eyes of Cairo—never lapsed before modern times. The graves of non-Muslims were to conform to Islamic precepts, ruled the caliph. They were to be “indistinguishable from the earth around.”
* * *
*1 Full deification did not come until the waning of ancient Egypt under the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic Dynasty (323–30 B.C.). The Greeks associated Imhotep with Asklepios, their god of healing.
*2 The pharaohs of unified Egypt retained separate titles to the former independent kingdoms. The ruler himself embodied their union by wearing the emblems of both Upper and Lower Egypt, and by symbolically reuniting the country in jubilee festivals held at Saqqara.
*3 Most historians believe that the Hebrews appeared in Egypt only 1,200 years later, when they may have worked to build a city in the eastern Delta for the Nineteenth Dynasty pharaoh Ramses II.
*4 This incident was reported by the medieval chronicler Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi. Subsequent generations blamed Mameluke soldiers or French troops under Napoleon for defacing the Sphinx, but there is no evidence for either. (See the article by Ulrich Haarmann in the bibliography for a more complete list of medieval destructions.)
*5 Jeremiah 43:13. “Images” may also be interpreted as “pillars” or “obelisks.” Jeremiah ascribed their destruction to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who attacked Egypt in 591 and 567 B.C. However, the deed may have been committed a century earlier by Assyrian invaders, or a few decades later by the Persians. The Hebrew Beth Shemesh endures in the name of an adjacent district of modern Cairo, ‘Ayn Shams. “Shams” means sun in Arabic—it was also the name of the pre-Islamic Arabian sun god. “ ‘Ayn” means an eye or a spring, but here it may simply be an adaptation of the name “On.”
*6 Until the 1940s A.D., however, the obelisk remained a site of annual pilgrimage. Joseph McPherson, a British officer in the Cairo police who wrote a book about folk festivals, records that peasants from nearby villages gathered here at dawn on the day of the spring festival known as Sham al-Nissim to watch the sun rise.
*7 Sodium sesquicarbonate. The salty substance is found in abundance in the desert between Memphis and Alexandria.
Chapter Three
CITIES OF THE DEAD
One mile distant from Cairo is a city that is not walled, is as large as Venice, and has tall structures and short ones….Every Saracen and townsman has a building in this city. In the short ones they bury their dead, and in the tall ones all the lords who own them give alms to the poor every Friday.
—Emmanuel Piloti the Cretan, c. 1440
CAIRO IMPRESSED Ibn Battuta more than any other city. It is odd, then, that his 2,000-page travelogue devoted just a scant few lines to describing the place. The peripatetic Moroccan skimped even on the Pyramids. They were, he insisted, round at the base and shaped like
cones—thus revealing that in five visits to Cairo he had never bothered to cross the Nile and take a closer look.
Ibn Battuta probably judged that his fourteenth-century readers were well enough acquainted with the city and its pagan monuments. To an educated Muslim the more impressive marvels were not pyramids, but tombs of more immediate relevance. The Muslim cemeteries south of the great city were, he wrote, places “of vast repute for blessed power.” Cairo’s great and good had erected here a whole parallel city of domed chapels that looked like houses surrounded by walls:
They construct chambers in them and hire the services of Koran readers who recite night and day in beautiful voices. Some build a mosque or a madrasa [a college of Islamic law] by the side of their mausoleum. They go out every Thursday evening to spend the night there with their children and womenfolk and make a circuit of the famous sanctuaries….The market people take out all kinds of edibles….The cemetery contains…an uncountable number of graves of men eminent for learning and religion, and in it lie a goodly number of the Companions of the Prophet and of the leading figures of both earlier and later generations….
Ibn Battuta went on to list all the famous graves he had visited. He was showing off his piety, of course, but in visiting the tombs he was also being a conscientious tourist. In his day the cemeteries of al-Khalifa were an established place of pilgrimage, especially for those Muslims unable to afford the journey to Mecca. A profusion of specialized guidebooks catered to visitors even in the thirteenth century. They listed famous sights, described the proper rituals associated with them, and recommended itineraries to take in such attractions as the tombs of the Holder of the Prophet’s Cloak; of Antar, carver of the Prophet’s pulpit; of Muhammad’s jeweler and standard-bearer; and of one of his suckling brothers—as well as a preserved footprint of Moses. According to Cairo’s foremost medieval chronicler, Taqi-al-Din al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), the graveyard in his day was the most popular pleasure resort in Egypt.