Tanis
The Delta Capital Of The Twenty First And Twenty Second Dynasties, And The Site Of The Greatest Egyptian Find Nobody Has Heard Of: Royal Tombs Opened In 1939 And 1940 Held Silver Coffins, Gold Masks And Jewellery To Rival Tutankhamun'S, Announced As Europe Went To War. What Stands Now Is A Wide Field Of Fallen Granite Obelisks, Colossi And Temple Blocks With The Treasure In Cairo · San El Hagar, Sharqia
In the spring of 1939 a French archaeologist opened a royal tomb in the eastern Delta and found silver coffins, gold funerary masks and jewellery that stand comparison with Tutankhamun's. He found more the following year. The announcement landed as Europe went to war, the world had other things to read about, and the greatest Egyptian discovery since 1922 became the one nobody has heard of. Tanis - San el-Hagar - was the capital of the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasties, a Delta city of temples built largely from stone carried here from older sites, and what stands today is honest about what the Delta does to stone: a very wide, very flat field scattered with fallen granite, broken obelisks, toppled colossi and column drums lying where they came down, with the mud-brick enclosure wall as a long low ridge around it. The treasure is in Cairo. What is here is scale, silence, and the strangeness of a capital city reduced to a field.
At San El Hagar in the eastern Delta, 70 km south-west of Port Said and 150 km north-east of Cairo, San El Hagar, Sharqia, Egypt
Daylight hours with a ticket when staffed, and WHETHER ANYONE IS THERE AT ALL IS THE FIRST QUESTION - this is a site with almost no visitors, a guard rather than a ticket hall, no visitor centre, no cafe and very little signage. Whether the royal tomb area is open or has been backfilled varies, so ask at the gate rather than planning around it, and understand that essentially everything found in those tombs is in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The site is large and entirely unshaded and the walking is across open ground. Reaching it needs a car: San el-Hagar is about 150 km north-east of Cairo and 70 south-west of Port Said, down minor Delta roads off the Zagazig or Faqous route, with no useful public transport and no accommodation nearby, so it is a day trip from Cairo or a stop on the way to the canal.