Travel: A trip to Tanis

The ruins of Tanis at the village of San al-Hagar (not to be confused with Sa al-Hagar, ancient Sais, or Behbeit al-Hagar, ancient Iseum) make an interesting and pleasant detour on an overnight trip to either

Port Said or Ismailia, where in both towns you will find a good variety of accommodations. For those planning a group outing by taxi or tour bus, tourist agencies in Ismailia or Cairo can arrange a day-trip to Tanis.

To visit Tanis, turn left from the Port Said road at a sign for al-Salihiya, seven kilometres north of its junction with the Cairo-Ismailia highway. Although the route to Tanis (sixty-eight kilometres) is fairly straightforward, bear in mind that you are heading for the town of Sa'ud, not Faqus or Husayniya, which are part of the route when coming from the south (Bilbeis and Zagazig). Although few local people will recognise the name Tanis, asking for 'the antiquities' (al-athar) may elicit the response "Sin," the local name for San al-Hagar (or, more properly, al-Salihiya), the village next to Tanis. Al-Salihiya was founded in the 19th century by Sultan al-Salih Ayyub as a stage for travellers on pilgrimage to Mecca. It subsequently figured heavily as an important point on the route to Syria, and Napoleon kept a garrison there while defending his conquests of Alexandria and Cairo against the Mamelukes.

The route keeps to the north and west of the large brown mound near the village of San al-Hagar, the typical signal of an antiquities site in the Delta. You must show your passport near the ticket office. You will be free to wander around the site as you please. Next to the ticket office is a small museum, but most of the objects recovered from Tanis are exhibited in two upstairs rooms of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

San al-Hagar, Egyptian Djanet, Greek Tanis, and identified by some with Biblical Zoan (in the land of Goshen) was the capital of several pharaohs of the Twenty-First and Twenty-Third Dynasties, besides being the supposed site of some of the action in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. (The desert scenes in the film were actually shot in Tunisia. In- cidentally, the Indiana Jones character was loosely based on the early 19th century Italian adventurer-archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni). This is the largest temple and burial complex in the Delta, and many renowned Egyptologists have excavated here, including Auguste Mariette (from 1860 to 1880), Flinders Petrie (from 1883 to 1886) and Pierre Montet, who began major excavations in 1939 that he resumed after the war.The site is huge and dates from the Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times. A massive mud-brick enclosure wall surrounds the Temple of Amun, which has been filled with an assortment of statues, stone blocks, and fallen obelisks in granite and sandstone, many of them carried here from earlier shrines in other parts of the country to be reused. Although the statues are of various dates between the Middle and New Kingdoms, the temple was probably not built before the Twenty-First Dynasty, probably by Pinudjem (1049-1036 BC). The temple was added later by Shoshenq 111, and restored by Nektanebo.Montet discovered six crudely decorated royal tombs within the enclosure, the only ones in Egypt apart from that of Tutankhamun to have been discovered intact. Four of them belonged to the Third Intermediate Period Pharaohs Psusennes I, Amenemopet, Osorkon II, and Shoshenq III. The first of these tombs also contained the silver coffin of Shoshenq II as well as the coffin and sarcophagus of Amenemopet, while the tomb of Osorkon II also held the sarcophagus of Takelot II. A seventh royal tomb was discovered more recently. It was Montet who was responsible for the now discredited theory that human sacrifice was practised here. In fact, human sacrifice appears to have ended with the First Dynasty.

During their 1990 season, French archaeologists sponsored by the French Gas Company found the outline of a temple that, they say, dwarfs Karnak temple in Luxor.Climbing to the top of the northern enclosure wall affords a rather extraordinary view of the surrounding countryside.Tell Fara'unNot far from San al-Hagar, near the small town of al-Husayniya, is the mound of Tell Fara'un. If you turn west at the ceremonial archway marking the entrance to al-Husayniya and follow the road for less than one kilometre, you will reach the mound, site of the ancient town of Imet. Here Flinders Petrie found a temple dedicated to Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt. There are two temples within the enclosure, the larger one dating from the New Kingdom and the smaller from the Late Period.

Petrie also found a cemetery containing numerous small mud-brick chambers, some cased with limestone, dating from the Twentieth Dynasty. Most had been robbed and rebuilt in later periods, but there remained many green-glazed ceramic funerary statuettes as well as thousands of glass, silver, and lapis lazuli beads, bronze spearheads, amulets, scarabs, and other objects. Other items found at Tell Fara'un include fragments of statues and a headless black granite sphinx inscribed with the cartouches of successive pharaohs, each of whom obliterated the name of his predecessor. Also found here were Middle and New Kingdom inscriptions, although the former appeared to have been usurped and brought here.

A Greco-Roman town is under excavation, and the warren of foundations is just next to the road.Tell al-Daba'aTell al-Daba'a lies in the eastern Delta near the village of al-Khata'na, about six kilometres northeast of Faqus. Like San al-Hagar and Tell Fara'un, it is northwest of Ismailia and is more easily approached from that direction. This is believed to be the site of Avaris, capital of the so-called 'Shepherd Kings'. These invaders from Babylonia, benefiting from their use of the horse - until then unknown to Egyptians - moved in through Palestine and occupied Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, about 1650 to 1550 BC. Avaris continued as a major settlement into the New Kingdom, and the third-century BC. Egyptian priest and historian Manetho stated that this was where the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt began. Today many archaeologists regard Tell al-Daba'a (Avaris) as a suburb of the large New Kingdom town of Pi-Ramesses.