Moreover, we now find various evidences of increasing connection with the North.  A princess named Ne-maat-hap, who seems to have been the mother of Sa-nekht, the first king of the Hid Dynasty, bears the name of the sacred Apis of Memphis, her name signifying “Possessing the right of Apis.”  According to Manetho, the kings of the Hid Dynasty are the first Memphites, and this seems to be quite correct.  With Ne-maat-hap the royal right seems to have been transferred to a Memphite house.  But the Memphites still had associations with Upper Egypt:  two of them, Tjeser Khet-neter and Sa-nekht, were buried near Abydos, in the desert at Bet Khallaf, where their tombs were discovered and excavated by Mr. Garstang in 1900.  The tomb of Tjeser is a great brick-built mastaba, forty feet high and measuring 300 feet by 150 feet.  The actual tomb-chambers are excavated in the rock, twenty feet below the ground-level and sixty feet below the top of the mastaba.  They had been violated in ancient times, but a number of clay jar-sealings, alabaster vases, and bowls belonging to the tomb furniture were found by the discoverer.  Sa-nekht’s tomb is similar.  In it was found the preserved skeleton of its owner, who was a giant seven feet high.

[Illustration:  082.jpg THE TOMB OF KING TJESER AT BET KHALLAF.  About 3700 B.C.]

It is remarkable that Manetho chronicles among the kings of the early period a king named Sesokhris, who was five cubits high.  This may have been Sa-nekht.

Tjeser had two tombs, one, the above-mentioned, near Abydos, the other at Sakkara, in the Memphite pyramid-field.  This is the famous Step-Pyramid.  Since Sa-nekht seems really to have been buried at Bet Khal-laf, probably Tjeser was, too, and the Step-Pyramid may have been his secondary or sham tomb, erected in the necropolis of Memphis as a compliment to Seker, the Northern god of the dead, just as Aha had his secondary tomb at Abydos in compliment to Khentamenti.  Sne-feru, also, the last king of the Hid Dynasty, seems to have had two tombs.  One of these was the great Pyramid of Medum, which was explored by Prof.  Petrie in 1891, the other was at Dashur.  Near by was the interesting necropolis already mentioned, in which was discovered evidence of the continuance of the cramped position of burial and of the absence of mummification among a certain section of the population even as late as the time of the IVth Dynasty.  This has been taken to imply that the fusion of the primitive Neolithic and invading sub-Semitic races had not been effected at that time.

With the IVth Dynasty the connection of the royal house with the South seems to have finally ceased.  The governmental centre of gravity was finally transferred to Memphis, and the kings were thenceforth for several centuries buried in the great pyramids which still stand in serried order along the western desert border of Egypt, from the Delta to the province of the Fayyum.  With the latest discoveries in this Memphite pyramid-field we shall deal in the next chapter.