A capital, but not a giant
Tanis, known in Egyptian as Djanet and today as San el-Hagar, was a significant royal city in the north-eastern Nile Delta. Calling it a metropolis overstates the case. The surviving remains are dominated by a walled temple precinct and its royal tombs, and there is no reliable evidence that the city held a very large population. A realistic picture is of a provincial-scale royal town, with a core enclosure of roughly four hundred metres across and a scatter of houses and workshops around it. Its importance came from who ruled from it rather than from how many people lived there.
Another correction concerns its reputation as a Ramesside city. Early excavators believed Tanis was Pi-Ramesse, the great residence of Ramesses II. Later work showed that Pi-Ramesse lay some distance to the south, near modern Qantir, and that many of the huge statues and blocks at Tanis were moved there from that earlier city when it declined.
The Third Intermediate Period setting
From about 1070 BCE the unified New Kingdom state broke apart. Kings of the 21st Dynasty ruled from Tanis in the north, while powerful priests of Amun governed Thebes in the south. The 22nd Dynasty, with kings named Shoshenq and Osorkon, continued to use Tanis as a royal centre for a time. This was a period of divided authority rather than collapse, and the two regions were linked by marriage and cooperation. The rise of Kushite kings, discussed under the Black pharaohs, eventually reunited Egypt from the south in the eighth century BCE.
Tanis was well placed for the period. It lay on a branch of the Nile close to routes to the Levant, and its rulers were able to draw on stone and goods from older monuments rather than quarrying new ones.
The temple enclosure
The centre of the site is a great mud-brick wall surrounding the temple of Amun and associated shrines. Inside lay large stone buildings, built largely with reused material from earlier sites. Granite columns, obelisks and statues carry the names of earlier kings, sometimes with later names added over them, which is one reason the site confused early excavators. The enclosure also had a sacred lake and areas for priests.
The royal tombs
Tanis is best known for the discovery of the royal burials by the French archaeologist Pierre Montet in 1939 and 1940, just as the Second World War began. Unlike the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, whose tombs lay in the Valley of the Kings, these rulers were buried inside the temple enclosure in compact stone-built chambers, close to the god they served.
The burials included several kings of the 21st and 22nd Dynasties, among them Psusennes I, Amenemope, Osorkon II and Shoshenq III. The tomb of Psusennes I held a silver coffin and a gold funerary mask, and the burial of Shoshenq II included a falcon-headed silver coffin. Silver was scarcer than gold in Egypt, which makes these objects especially notable. Some chambers also contained burial goods that had been reused, a habit that reflects both the era’s limited resources and its practical attitudes.
The discovery is often compared with the Tutankhamun tomb discovery of 1922, but the Tanis finds received much less attention at the time because of the outbreak of war. The objects are now mainly in Cairo, and they remain one of the best sources for royal funerary practice in this period. They also illustrate Egyptian afterlife beliefs, since the choice of coffins and the funerary texts followed long-established patterns even in a changed political world.
Decline and later reputation
Tanis remained a regional centre for some centuries, but it faded as the Delta’s river branches shifted and as other cities, including Alexandria, took over. The Bible refers to a place called Zoan that scholars identify with Tanis, which is part of why the site had a lasting name in European scholarship.
Modern excavation has continued, and questions about the city’s layout, its population and the exact order of some burials remain open. The sensible reading is of a royal burial ground and ritual centre that mattered greatly to its dynasty, even if the city itself was never large by the standards of Memphis or Thebes.