Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa

An underground tomb complex on three levels in Alexandria, reached by a spiral staircase that winds around a central shaft. The shaft was how the dead were lowered; the living walked down beside them.

The lowest level is flooded and closed, but the two above are open and cool — a genuine relief in an Alexandrian summer. Allow an hour.

What makes it strange

The decoration is a collision of three cultures that exists almost nowhere else. In the main burial chamber, Anubis stands in the armour of a Roman legionary, with a sword and a cloak. Egyptian gods appear with Roman drapery and Greek proportions. A pair of serpents wear the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt while carrying the thyrsus of Dionysus, and above them sit Medusa heads as protective devices.

• The triclinium — a banqueting room with stone couches, where mourners ate a funerary meal beside the tomb
• The Hall of Caracalla, reached separately, which held human and horse bones together
• Dozens of loculi — body-length niches stacked in the walls

The catacombs were cut in the 2nd century CE, probably beginning as a single wealthy family's tomb and expanding over generations into a communal burial place holding several hundred people.

Found by a donkey

They had been completely forgotten. In 1900 a donkey pulling a cart through the Karmuz district fell through the ground and dropped into the shaft. The excavation that followed opened the whole complex.

The Arabic name, Kom el-Shoqafa, means "mound of shards" — a reference to the heaps of broken pottery on the site, left by visitors who brought food and wine to eat with their dead and then smashed the vessels rather than carry them home.

Alexandria's mixture, in one room

The blend is not confusion or bad copying. Roman Alexandria was Greek-speaking, Egyptian in religion and Roman in government, and its people were entirely comfortable holding all three at once. A family here could commission an Egyptian mummification, a Greek-style banquet hall and Roman portrait sculpture for the same tomb without any sense of contradiction.

Anubis in legionary armour is the single clearest image of that anywhere — the old jackal god of embalming, kitted out as an officer of the occupying power, still doing exactly the job he had always done.