Abstract
THE news of the dangerous floods at Memphis, Tennessee, inevitably invites a comparison with its Egyptian namesake. The modern town was laid out in 1819 (soon after the evacuation of the surrounding territory by the Chickasaw Indians) by three men, John Overton, Andrew Jackson, and James Winchester, who gave it the name of the most ancient of the great capitals of Egypt because of the similarity in the geographical positions of the two sites. They realised that the American site enjoyed an advantageous position at the head of the navigable waters of the Mississippi, and from that they doubtless hoped—and time has amply justified their hope—to derive the great commercial future for their new city which a like position at the apex of the Nile Delta had secured for Egyptian Memphis throughout a period of three thousand years.
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GLANVILLE, S. The Floods at Memphis. Nature 119, 813–814 (1927). https://doi.org/10.1038/119813b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/119813b0
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