Located in the northeastern Delta, Tanis (known today as San el-Hagar) was the royal city and port of the 21st and 22nd Dynasties. The city was built on two geziras (mounded natural formations of sand); the northern one, which is called Tell San el-Hagar, has remains covering an area of ca. 177 hectares. Although many of the monumental stone blocks found at Tanis are inscribed with the cartouches of Rameses II and his son Merenptah, it is now evident that they were moved there from the 19th-Dynasty capital of Piramesse (modern Qantir), and other sites, perhaps by way of Piramesse. According to Manfred Bietak, Piramesse was probably abandoned because it was located next to the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, by then silted up.
Tanis was investigated in 1860 by Auguste Mariette, and two decades later Flinders Petrie excavated there. In the 20th century the site was excavated by French archaeologists and work continues there under the direction of Philippe Brissaud. Because the site covers an enormous area, Brissaud has studied the many mounded features with photographs made by a camera suspended from a kite, which has been helpful in differentiating Greco-Roman Period structures built over ones of the Third Intermediate Period. Outside of the great temple precinct much of the ancient city remains to be investigated (see Figure 9.2).
The most imposing monument at Tanis was the Temple of Amen, founded in the 21st Dynasty by Psusennes I, who also built the temple’s polygonal enclosure wall. Blocks for the Amen temple were transferred not only from Piramesse, but also from other monuments of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. The entire complex, including a later Temple of Horus to the east (begun in the 30th Dynasty and finished by a Ptolemaic king) was surrounded by a second, massive mud-brick enclosure wall (430 m x 370 m, and 15 m thick). On the western side of this wall Sheshonq III built a large monumental gateway, which was connected to the temple’s pylon by a processional way lined with obelisks of Rameses II.
World History
