After lunch on the day we visited the Pyramids, we drove the 10 miles or so south of Giza to the ancient town of Memphis. Memphis was likely founded 5000 years ago upon the unification of the two kingdoms of Upper (Southern) and Lower (Northern) Egypt*. It was the capital of Ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom (roughly 2630 BC - 2150 BC), during which the Great Pyramid Pharaohs reigned, and for periods during the New Kingdom a millenium later.
Evidently, a Memphian temple to the God Ptah gave us our name for Egypt. The Ptolemaic Egyptologist Manetho transliterated the Egyptian phrase for "Place of the life-force of Ptah" into the Greek syllables "Ai-gy-ptos", and that name stuck for the country as a whole.
The main site we visited in Memphis was an open air museum. It has many statues, including a sphinx. The big draw, however, is the 30 ft. alabaster Colossus of Ramses II, found in 1820, which is located in a small building on the site. For more of my pictures of the open air museum, click here.*"Upper" and "Lower" Egypt are in reference to the flow of the Nile. The sources of the Nile -- the Ehtiopian Plateau (Blue Nile) and the Central African highlands (White Nile) -- are south of Egypt. So Upper Egypt is south of Lower Egypt (the Nile Delta).
