Travel Guide Tanis

Off the beaten tourist track, the Tell San site at Tanis is bordered by the bahr Saft, an ancient branch of the Nile. It stretches over fossilized sand dunes, producing a rise in land almost 3 km long and 1.5 km wide. Tanis was originally a port of Pi-Ramses, and the metropolis of Amun for northern Egypt; the city expanded from the end of the 20th dynasty, and became under the 21st dynasty the capital of an Egypt ready to divide itself between North and South. It was conceived as a structural replica of Thebes. A religious metropolis under Dynasty XXII, it retained its indisputable importance until the Ptolemaic era. In late Roman and Byzantine times, the site suffered the repercussions of ecological changes: the advance of salt water was responsible for the gradual degradation of agricultural land, as well as for major economic changes with the modification of trade circuits at the time; from then on, the decline of Tanis was inevitable.Today, the site is being restored by a French archaeological mission; a support society was created in 1988 to contribute to the excavations carried out on a site that donated to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo a priceless treasure discovered in the site's tombs between 1929 and 1956. The mask of Psusennes I, which served as the poster for the "Pharaoh" exhibition mounted by the Arab World Institute in 2004, is also part of the Tanis treasure.