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.
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