one at Abydos.  If Osiris-Khentamenti at Abydos had his tablet of kings, so should Osiris-Seker at Sakkara.  But Tunure does not begin his list with Mena; his initial king is Merpeba.  For him Merpeba was the first monarch to be commemorated at Sakkara.  Does not this look very much as if the strictly historical Merpeba, not the rather legendary and confused Mena, was regarded as the first Memphite king?  It may well be that it was in the reign of Merpeba, not in that of Aha or Narmer, that Memphis was founded.

The XIXth Dynasty lists of course say nothing about Mena or Merpeba having founded Memphis; they only give the names of the kings, nothing more.  The earliest authority for the ascription of Memphis to “Menes”, is Herodotus, who was followed in this ascription, as in many other matters, by Manetho; but it must be remembered that Manetho was writing for the edification of a Greek king (Ptolemy Philadelphus) and his Greek court at Alexandria, and had therefore to evince a respect for the great Greek classic which he may not always have really felt.  Herodotus is not, of course, accused of any wilful misstatement in this or in any other matter in which his accuracy is suspected.  He merely wrote down what he was told by the Egyptians themselves, and Merpeba was sufficiently near in time to Aha to be easily confounded with him by the scribes of the Persian period, who no doubt ascribed everything to “Mena” that was done by the kings of the Ist and IId Dynasties.  Therefore it may be considered quite probable that the “Menes” who founded Memphis was Merpeba, the fifth or sixth king of the Ist Dynasty, whom Tunure, a thousand years before the time of Herodotus and his informants, placed at the head of the Memphite “List of Sakkara.”

The reconquest of the North by Khasekhemui doubtless led to a further strengthening of Memphis; and it is quite possible that the deeds of this king also contributed to make up the sum total of those ascribed to the Herodotean and Manethonian Menes.

It may be that a town of the Northerners existed here before the time of the Southern Conquest, for Phtah, the local god of Memphis, has a very marked character of his own, quite different from that of Khen-tamenti, the Osiris of Abydos.  He is always represented as a little bow-legged hydrocephalous dwarf very like the Phoenician Kabeiroi.  It may be that here is another connection between the Northern Egyptians and the Semites.  The name “Phtah,” the “Opener,” is definitely Semitic.  We may then regard the dwarf Phtah as originally a non-Egyptian god of the Northerners, probably Semitic in origin, and his town also as antedating the conquest.  But it evidently was to the Southerners that Memphis owed its importance and its eventual promotion to the position of capital of the united kingdom.  Then the dwarf Phtah saw himself rivalled by another Phtah of Southern Egyptian origin, who had been installed at Memphis by the Southerners.  This Phtah was