If Giza is Egypt's great icon, Memphis and Saqqara are where it all began. Here, some twenty kilometres south of Cairo, is where it started. Memphis was the first capital of unified Egypt, the city the early pharaohs ruled the country from for centuries. Saqqara, its huge necropolis, is where the first pyramid in history was built. Before Khufu and before the Sphinx came Djoser and his Step Pyramid, the oldest cut-stone building in the world.
Saqqara gets fewer visitors than Giza and, for many, it is more fascinating. It is a vast desert plain dotted with pyramids, mastabas and tombs dug over more than three thousand years. Here you can go down into nobles' tombs decorated with reliefs in astonishingly vivid colours. They show everyday life in ancient Egypt, from hunting, fishing and harvests to banquets, and look as if they were painted yesterday. Almost every year new sarcophagi, mummies and treasures turn up here and make headlines around the world, because Saqqara is one of the richest and least exhausted necropolises in the country.
This guide takes a practical look at Memphis and Saqqara. It covers what to see at each site, how to combine them on a trip from Cairo and what the tickets cost (the Pyramid of Djoser, the Serapeum and the nobles' tombs are paid separately). It also explains why they deserve a place on any trip to Egypt. Coming here is a glimpse of the very dawn of pharaonic civilisation, the moment the Egyptians learned to build for eternity.
According to tradition, Memphis was founded by King Narmer (or Menes) around 3100 BC, when he unified Upper and Lower Egypt. It became the country's first capital and its great centre throughout the Old Kingdom. Dedicated to the god Ptah, patron of craftsmen, it grew into one of the largest cities of the ancient world. Its necropolis, Saqqara, stretches across the nearby desert and was used as a sacred cemetery for more than 3,000 years, from the 1st Dynasty to the Greco-Roman period. Its most famous monument is the Step Pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser (Djeser), from the 3rd Dynasty, around 2650 BC. It was designed by the architect Imhotep and is the first pyramid and the first large monumental work in cut stone in history, the forerunner of all the others. Saqqara is also home to the Serapeum, the underground galleries where the sacred Apis bulls were buried in huge granite sarcophagi. When the capital moved to Thebes and later to Alexandria, Memphis declined. After the Arabs founded Fustat and Cairo, it was abandoned and stripped of its stone. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of historic and modern Egypt: from ancient Memphis and the pyramids of Giza to the Arab megacity of Cairo and Mediterranean Alexandria.
Read the history of Cairo and the north →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. There are not many in Giza, but the ones there are worth it. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Tap the cards below and have a look.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Egypt as a state begins here. According to the tradition handed down by the ancients, around 3100 BC a southern king called Narmer, often identified with the legendary Menes, united by force the two kingdoms that until then had shared the Nile valley: Upper Egypt (the narrow valley to the south) and Lower Egypt (the wide delta to the north). To rule this newborn country, he founded a new capital right at the hinge between the two, where the valley opens out into the delta: Memphis. It was no accident but a political and geographical statement: whoever controlled Memphis controlled all of Egypt.
During the Old Kingdom, the 'age of the pyramids', Memphis became the country's great political, administrative and religious centre, and one of the largest cities in the world. Its best-known Egyptian name, 'Men-nefer', gave rise to the Greek Memphis. The city was dedicated to the god Ptah, the creator and patron of craftsmen and architects, whose great temple, the Hut-ka-Ptah ('the mansion of the ka of Ptah'), gave its name, through the Greek 'Aigyptos', to the whole country: Egypt.
For centuries, even after the political capital moved south to Thebes, Memphis remained a revered metropolis, a religious and economic centre of the first rank and the place where pharaohs were crowned. Greeks, Persians and Romans still knew it as a great city. Its decline came with the rise of Alexandria and, above all, with the Arab founding of Fustat and Cairo, after which Memphis was abandoned and its stones reused. Today, all that remains of that immense capital is a scattering of statues among palm groves.
Saqqara, the vast necropolis of Memphis spread across the neighbouring desert, is the setting for one of the greatest leaps in the history of architecture. Until the Third Dynasty, pharaohs and nobles were buried in mastabas: rectangular tombs of mudbrick or stone, low and solid, with the burial chamber dug beneath them. But around 2650 BC, the pharaoh Djoser (Zoser) and his architect Imhotep came up with something revolutionary: stacking several stone mastabas, each smaller than the one below, to form a monumental staircase to the sky. The pyramid was born.
The Step Pyramid of Djoser, about sixty metres high with six steps, was the world's first pyramid and, above all, the first large building made entirely of cut stone, at a time when people built with mudbrick and wood. It was not just a tomb but the heart of a huge walled funerary complex, with ritual courtyards, chapels and symbolic buildings, designed so the dead king could re-enact the ceremonies of his reign for eternity.
The genius behind it all, Imhotep, was much more than an architect: chancellor and high priest, he was so revered by later generations that, some two thousand years after his death, he was deified as a god of wisdom and medicine, an extraordinary honour for someone who was not a pharaoh. The Greeks identified him with their own god of medicine, Asclepius. That the name of history's first great architect has survived four and a half millennia says a lot about the impact of his work: without Djoser's pyramid, there would probably have been no pyramids at Giza.
Saqqara is not a single monument but an immense city of the dead that was in use for more than three thousand years, from the dawn of dynastic Egypt to the Graeco-Roman period. No other cemetery in the world has been used for so long. Over those millennia, pharaohs, princes, senior officials, priests, scribes and craftsmen were buried here, layer upon layer, leaving a desert landscape dotted with pyramids, mastabas, rock-cut tombs and underground galleries.
Next to Djoser's pyramid, later pyramids were built, such as those of Userkaf, Unas and Teti. The pyramid of Unas, from the Fifth Dynasty, hides a treasure you can't see from outside: the 'Pyramid Texts', the oldest body of religious literature in the world, spells and prayers carved into the walls of the burial chamber to guide the pharaoh into the afterlife. Unas was the first king to have them inscribed, starting a tradition that lasted for millennia. The mastabas of nobles such as Ti, Mereruka, Kagemni and the 'two brothers' Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep preserve astonishingly lively reliefs depicting everyday life in the Old Kingdom.
One of the most remarkable places is the Serapeum, a maze of underground galleries where, for more than a thousand years, the sacred Apis bulls were buried, considered the incarnation of the god Ptah. Each Apis bull was mummified like a pharaoh and laid to rest in a colossal granite sarcophagus weighing dozens of tonnes. Rediscovered by the Frenchman Auguste Mariette in 1850, the Serapeum still amazes visitors with the scale and precision of its sarcophagi. And Saqqara keeps springing surprises: it is one of the most active necropolises in Egyptian archaeology, with intact tombs and mummies found almost every year.
Although Memphis was one of the most important cities of the ancient world for more than two millennia, its decline was long and, in the end, almost total. The first blow came when Egypt's centre of gravity shifted south to Thebes (modern Luxor) during the New Kingdom, and north to the new capitals in the delta. Even so, Memphis kept its religious prestige and its role as the place of coronations. Persians, Ptolemaic Greeks and Romans still knew it as a great city.
Two events sped up the decline. First, the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, which replaced Memphis as the country's great metropolis. And above all, the arrival of Christianity and then Islam: with the Arab conquest in the 7th century and the founding of Fustat and, later, Cairo, very close to Memphis but on the opposite bank, the old capital was overshadowed for good by the new city.
From then on, Memphis became a quarry. For centuries its temples, palaces and statues were dismantled, and their stones and blocks carted off to build medieval Cairo: mosques, walls and palaces of the Islamic capital were literally built from the remains of the pharaohs' first capital. The Nile's annual flood, laden with silt, slowly buried whatever was left. That is why today, where one of humanity's greatest cities once stood, only a handful of statues survive (such as the colossal reclining Ramesses II) along with scattered remains among the palm groves of Mit Rahina, while its necropolis, Saqqara, protected by the desert sands, has survived far better than the city it served.
The scientific rediscovery of Memphis and Saqqara is the work of modern Egyptology, born in the 19th century. Explorers and archaeologists such as Auguste Mariette, who found the Serapeum in 1850 and founded the Egyptian Antiquities Service, began excavating the necropolis systematically, bringing tombs, statues and galleries to light. In the 20th century, the French Egyptologist Jean-Philippe Lauer devoted more than seventy years of his life, from 1926 until his death in 2001, to patiently excavating and restoring the Djoser complex, in one of the longest and most devoted restoration efforts in the history of archaeology.
In 1979, UNESCO added Memphis and its necropolis to the World Heritage List. The site covers the pyramid fields from Giza to Dahshur, with Saqqara at its centre, and was recognised for its outstanding universal value as a record of the birth of pharaonic civilisation and monumental architecture.
Far from being exhausted, Saqqara is enjoying a real golden age of discovery. In recent years, Egyptian archaeological missions have announced spectacular finds: shafts holding dozens of sealed, intact sarcophagi of priests and officials, mummies with golden tongues, human and animal mummification workshops, painted tombs in astonishing condition and galleries with thousands of mummified animals (cats, ibises, crocodiles) offered to the gods. Every season Saqqara keeps giving up treasures that make headlines around the world, a reminder that much of the history of Egypt's first capital still lies undiscovered beneath the sand of its necropolis.
