If we may believe the tradition, there was, when the idea of building the new capital arose, a difficulty in obtaining a site in all respects advantageous.  The Nile, before debouching upon the plain, hugged for many miles the base of the Libyan hills, and was thus on the wrong side of the valley.  It was wanted on the other side, in order to be a water-bulwark against an Asiatic invader.  The founder, therefore, before building his city, undertook a gigantic work.  He raised a great embankment across the natural course of the river; and, forcing it from its bed, made it enter a new channel and run midway down the valley, or, if anything, rather towards its eastern side.  He thus obtained the bulwark against invasion that he required, and he had an ample site for his capital between the new channel of the stream and the foot of the western hills.

It is undoubtedly strange to hear of such a work being constructed at the very dawn of history, by a population that was just becoming a people.  But in Egypt precocity is the rule—­a Minerva starts full-grown from the head of Jove.  The pyramids themselves cannot be placed very long after the supposed reign of Menes; and the engineering skill implied in the pyramids is simply of a piece with that attributed to the founder of Memphis.

In ancient times a city was nothing without a temple; and the capital city of the most religious people in the world could not by any possibility lack that centre of civic life which its chief temple always was to every ancient town.  Philosophy must settle the question how it came to pass that religious ideas were in ancient times so universally prevalent and so strongly pronounced.  History is only bound to note the fact.  Coeval, then, with the foundation of the city of Menes was, according to the tradition, the erection of a great temple to Phthah—­“the Revealer,” the Divine artificer, by whom the world and man were created, and the hidden thought of the remote Supreme Being was made manifest to His creatures, Phthah’s temple lay within the town, and was originally a naos or “cell,” a single building probably not unlike that between the Sphinx’s paws at Ghizeh, situated within a temenos, or “sacred enclosure,” watered from the river, and no doubt planted with trees.  Like the medieval cathedrals, the building grew with the lapse of centuries, great kings continually adding new structures to the main edifice, and enriching it with statuary and painting.  Herodotus saw it in its full glory, and calls it “a vast edifice, very worthy of commemoration.”  Abd-el-Latif saw it in its decline, and notes the beauty of its remains:  “the great monolithic shrine of breccia verde, nine cubits high, eight long, and seven broad, the doors which swung on hinges of stone, the well-carven statues, and the lions terrific in their aspect."[7] At the present day scarcely a trace remains.  One broken colossus of the Great Ramesses, till very recently prostrate, and a few nondescript fragments, alone continue on the spot, to attest to moderns the position of that antique fane, which the Egyptians themselves regarded as the oldest in their land.