Tanis

Tanis became the northern capital in the eleventh century BC, and its builders took a shortcut that shapes the site today: they carted in obelisks, colossi and blocks from older cities, above all from Pi-Ramesses nearby, and reused them wholesale. The great temple enclosure is now a chaotic field of broken granite, obelisk sections and colossal fragments lying where they fell, which gives it an atmosphere quite unlike the swept sites of the south. In 1939 Pierre Montet found the royal necropolis here, a group of tombs of the Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Dynasties that had not been robbed, containing silver coffins, gold masks and jewellery comparable in quality to Tutankhamun's.

History

Tanis is not recorded before the 19th Dynasty, when it was the capital of the 14th nome of Lower Egypt, and the city itself appears in two 20th Dynasty texts, the Onomasticon of Amenope and the Story of Wenamun, as the home of the future king Smendes. Its earliest known buildings date from the 21st Dynasty: when the Pelusiac branch of the Nile silted up and the royal residence of Pi-Ramesses was abandoned at the end of the New Kingdom, Tanis became the seat of the kings of the 21st Dynasty and later of the 22nd, and most of its older monuments were brought from Pi-Ramesses and other nearby cities for reuse. These kings built and enlarged the Great Temple of Amun-Ra, with smaller temples to Mut and Khonsu, deliberately echoing Thebes, and their new royal necropolis here took the place of the Valley of the Kings. After the 22nd Dynasty Tanis was no longer a royal residence but became capital of the 19th nome; a new phase of building began under the 30th Dynasty and lasted through the Ptolemaic Period, and the city was lived in until it was abandoned in Roman times. In Late Antiquity it was the seat of Coptic bishops, though by the 7th century it had clearly declined, and the census of 1885 recorded the village of San el-Hagar with 1,569 people (Wikipedia, Tanis).

What to look for

• A field of fallen granite - obelisks and colossi lying as they broke.
• The royal tomb chambers - the intact burials found in 1939.
• Reused blocks from Pi-Ramesses - an older capital quarried for this one.
• The vast mud-brick enclosure - the temple precinct walls on the Delta plain.

When to go

October to April. Two to three hours on site, but three hours of driving each way from Cairo makes it a full day. Mornings for light on the granite. It is almost always empty of visitors.

Practical notes

The site is a jumble and hard to read without a plan or a guide; nothing stands upright. The tombs are small, damp and often locked. The drive through the Delta is slow and the roads are poor. There are no facilities and little signage.

Nearby

Bubastis lies south-west toward Zagazig; Cairo is about three hours away.

Key facts