A royal city of the 21st and 22nd Dynasties, where the kings were buried inside the temple walls.
Where
San el-Hagar, in the northeastern Delta
When
Capital under the 21st and 22nd Dynasties (c. 1069–715 BC)
Built by
Psusennes I and his successors, with stone and statues brought from older cities
Found
The royal tombs: Pierre Montet, 1939–1940
Who built what
When the New Kingdom ended (c. 1069 BC), the kings of the 21st Dynasty ruled the north from Djanet, which the Greeks called Tanis and the Bible calls Zoan. Psusennes I surrounded the great temple of Amun with a huge mud-brick wall. Much of the stone in the temple came from older buildings, above all from Pi-Ramesses, the abandoned Delta capital of Ramesses II, so Tanis is full of obelisks and statues carved with his names.
Because of all those Ramesside monuments, early excavators thought Tanis was Pi-Ramesses itself, or even the Hyksos capital Avaris. Excavations at Qantir and Tell el-Dabʿa, about 25 km south, later showed that those cities lay there instead.
What survives
The kings of Tanis were buried in stone tombs inside the temple enclosure. In 1939 and 1940 Pierre Montet found them: the burial of Psusennes I was unplundered, with a gold mask and a silver coffin, and the outer stone sarcophagus had been made for Merneptah of the 19th Dynasty and reused. The finds are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Because the war began just then, the discovery got little attention compared with Tutankhamun's.
Today the site is a field of fallen granite blocks, obelisks and statues, with the walls of the royal tombs open to the sky.
Tanis flourished after the New Kingdom, in the Third Intermediate Period.
Inscriptions
2 short, well-known texts from Tanis, each with its transliteration (the Egyptian sounds in Latin letters) and a translation. Tap Sign by sign to see what each sign is and how it is read. Royal names are drawn in their cartouches.
The name of Psusennes I
Transliteration
pꜣ-sbꜣ-ḫꜥ-n-njwt mrj-jmn
Translation
“The star that appears in the city, beloved of Amun”
Where: On his silver coffin, his gold mask and the objects of his burial, and on blocks of the temple.
"Psusennes" is the Greek form of pꜣ-sbꜣ-ḫꜥ-n-njwt. "The city" is Thebes, the city of Amun: the kings in Tanis still called themselves beloved of the Theban god.
Simplified: The signs are shown in reading order. In his cartouches the name of Amun is written first out of honor, and the arrangement varies from object to object.
Sign by sign
Reading: The reading and translation as in the Wikipedia article "Psusennes I".
Ramesses II, brought from Pi-Ramesses
Transliteration
rꜥ-ms-sw
Translation
“Ramesses ("Ra is the one who bore him")”
Where: On the obelisks, colossal statues and blocks lying in the temple area.
Tanis has more monuments with Ramesses II's name than any other Delta site, but he did not build there: the kings of Tanis moved them from his city, Pi-Ramesses, after it was abandoned when its branch of the Nile silted up.
Sign by sign
Reading: The standard reading (Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (3rd ed., 1957), Excursus A on the royal titulary); the Wikipedia article "Ramesses II".
I. Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000), ch. 12
Dates follow Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000); before 664 BC they are approximate. Readings are the standard ones in the sources named under each inscription; translations are Teddy Rook Book's own. The hieroglyphs are drawn in the site's font, TRB Hieroglyphs, so their shapes are simplified; where an inscription's arrangement or signs can't be shown faithfully, the card says so.