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, though the discovery was overshadowed by the outbreak of war weeks later.

What you actually see

• 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.

Honest expectations

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.