Memphis Open-Air Museum

An open-air museum in a palm grove at Mit Rahina, on the site of what was for most of its history the capital of Egypt. The city is essentially gone, so what you visit is a garden of what survived: statues, sphinxes and architectural fragments gathered under trees.

The two things everyone comes for

• The colossus of Ramesses II — around ten metres of fine limestone, lying on its back in a purpose-built hall with a gallery so you can look down on the face. Its feet are missing, which is why it was never raised. The workmanship is exceptional: the pleats of the kilt, the jewellery, the intricate dagger at the belt
• The alabaster sphinx, about eighty tonnes, carved from a single block and standing in the open

Most visits take under an hour and are combined with Saqqara, ten minutes away. Go with the knowledge of what stood here, or the garden will feel slight.

Memphis was founded around 3100 BCE, by tradition at the moment Upper and Lower Egypt were unified, and it sat at the hinge point where the Nile valley opens into the Delta — the natural place to control both halves of the country. For long stretches of three thousand years it was the largest city in the world.

Its Egyptian name, Hut-ka-Ptah, "the enclosure of the soul of Ptah", was borrowed by the Greeks as Aigyptos. The country's name in most European languages descends from a temple that stood on this spot.

Why nothing is left

Three things removed it. The Nile shifted its course eastwards, burying the low-lying city under metres of silt. The founding of Fustat and then Cairo, thirty kilometres north, made Memphis a quarry rather than a capital — its limestone went into the medieval city, and its granite into mosques. And what remained was ploughed over as the floodplain was farmed.

Herodotus visited and described a great temple of Ptah. It is under the fields.

What is still down there

Very little of Memphis has been excavated, because most of it lies below the water table and beneath cultivated land. Surveys have mapped a large buried settlement, and the necropolis that served it — Saqqara, Dahshur, Abusir and Giza, thirty kilometres of tombs along the escarpment — is entirely a product of this city. You have almost certainly visited Memphis's cemeteries without visiting Memphis.