Beni Hasan and Tell el-Amarna

Thirty Nine Middle Kingdom Tombs Cut Into A Cliff, Four Of Them Open And Painted With Wrestling Sequences, Acrobats, Crafts And A Caravan Of Foreigners That Has Been Argued Over For Two Centuries And, An Hour South, The Flat Empty Site Of Akhetaten, The Capital Akhenaten Built From Nothing And Abandoned After Seventeen Years · Minya, Minya

Two sites in Middle Egypt that almost nobody stops for, both of them first rank. At Beni Hasan thirty-nine tombs are cut into a cliff above the east bank, and the four that are open carry Middle Kingdom painting of a kind the royal tombs never attempted: wrestling sequences drawn as move-by-move instruction, acrobats, cattle counts, glassmakers, and a procession of foreigners in coloured cloaks that has been argued over for two centuries by people hoping it shows the Israelites. An hour south is Tell el-Amarna, where Akhenaten built a capital from nothing in open desert, worshipped one god from it for seventeen years, and had it abandoned and quarried away after his death - so what you walk is a vast flat site of outlines with tomb chapels in the cliffs behind. Between them they hold the two strangest episodes in Egyptian history. Check current travel advice for Middle Egypt before you go.

Rock tombs in the cliff above the east bank at Beni Hasan, with Akhenaten's city at Tell el-Amarna 60 km south, Minya, Minya, Egypt

Both sites open daily in daylight with separate tickets, shorter in winter. Which of the four painted tombs at Beni Hasan are open varies, and so does whether the lift up the cliff face is working or whether it is the long stair - ask at the ticket office rather than at the bottom of the climb. At Amarna the North and South tomb groups and the Royal Tomb are each a drive apart across the plain and open on rotation. Neither site has a cafe. Minya is the base: trains from Cairo take three to four hours, and a car with a driver for the day is the only sensible way to cover both. Foreign visitors have at times been assigned a police escort on these roads, which is normal rather than alarming when it happens; check current advice for your nationality.

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