How Memphis, Tennessee, Got a Name From Egypt

Memphis, Tennessee, borrowed its name from the ancient city on the Nile, and an 1820 notice about the new town called the Mississippi “the American Nile.” Henry Gannett, writing for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, gave the reason in one line: the town is “situated upon the river in a manner very similar to the city in Egypt.”

An American Nile

The comparison shows up right at the start. James D. Davis, who said he’d lived on the bluff for more than 45 years, reprinted in his 1873 history a piece from the Portfolio, a Philadelphia publication, in 1820. Davis says people at the time thought General Andrew Jackson wrote it. It announces that “a town of the above name has been laid off on the east bank of the Mississippi river, at the lower Chickasaw Bluffs, in the county of Shelby,” and further on it calls the Mississippi a river that “may with propriety be denominated the American Nile.”

So the people selling the lots were already thinking about Egypt. J. M. Keating, in his 1888 history of the city, says Judge John Overton, who laid off the town in 1819, predicted it would become “a rival of its ancient namesake on the banks of the Nile.” Keating also traces the town plan to an agreement dated January 6, 1819, between Andrew Jackson, John Overton and James Winchester.

Jackson or “Old Ike”?

That’s where it gets murky. Every one of these books agrees on Egypt, but none of them has a record of who actually picked the name. In a footnote, Keating says the name “is generally attributed to General Andrew Jackson.” In the same note he gives you the other version. A man named J. J. Rawlings, still alive in 1888, said “he remembers it to have been current at the time that it was thus named by Mr. Isaac Rawlings, a distant connection of his, who was an Indian agent, located at Fort Pickering.”

Isaac Rawlings wasn’t a nobody. Keating says he came to the bluff as a sutler, a merchant who sold to soldiers, ran the government store, and was picked as the first magistrate “by popular acclamation.” People called him “Old Ike.” Still, a memory of what was “current at the time,” told decades later, isn’t paperwork, so you’re left with two names and no signature. If one has the edge, it’s Jackson, and only because Keating says that’s who people generally credited. The Rawlings story rests on one man’s memory. Neither comes with a document.

The Egyptian name behind it

Keating couldn’t resist explaining the original, too. In the same footnote he writes that the Egyptian city was “Men-Nofer, ‘the good place,’ perverted Memphis by the Greeks.” That’s his account, from 1888, and it’s about the Egyptian word, not anything in Tennessee. The Tennessee town just borrowed the finished product, a famous river city’s name for a new one on another big river.

Sources & further reading

• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (U.S. Geological Survey, 1905), p. 205. Memphis “so named because situated upon the river in a manner very similar to the city in Egypt.”
• James D. Davis, The History of the City of Memphis (1873), pp. 27–29. The 1820 Portfolio notice, attributed at the time to General Jackson, on the town “laid off on the east bank of the Mississippi river, at the lower Chickasaw Bluffs,” and the Mississippi as “the American Nile.” Davis describes himself on the title page as a resident of the bluff for over 45 years.
• J. M. Keating, History of the City of Memphis and Shelby County, vol. 1 (1888). Overton laying off the city in 1819 (p. 5); the footnote with “Men-Nofer,” the Rawlings version and the attribution to Jackson, plus Isaac Rawlings as sutler, store-keeper and first magistrate (pp. 139–140); the agreement of January 6, 1819 (pp. 142–143); Overton’s “ancient namesake on the banks of the Nile” (p. 149).
• GNIS feature 1326388 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Memphis, in Shelby County.