Tuna el-Gebel

The necropolis of ancient Hermopolis, in Middle Egypt, and one of the strangest sites in the country. Three quite different things sit within a short walk of each other, and each would be notable on its own.

The catacombs

Kilometres of rock-cut galleries were dug here to hold mummified ibises and baboons — the sacred animals of Thoth, god of writing and of this region. Pilgrims bought a mummified bird as an offering and it was interred in the tunnels; over centuries the numbers ran into the millions. You can walk a lit section of the galleries and see the stacked pottery jars still in their niches.

The tomb of Petosiris

A high priest of Thoth around the 4th century BCE built himself a tomb shaped like a temple. Its reliefs are the reason to come: Egyptian in layout and subject, but the figures wear Greek dress, stand in Greek poses and are modelled with Greek volume. It is the moment two artistic traditions met, caught on one set of walls.

Isadora

A separate small tomb holds the body of a young woman who drowned in the Nile in the 2nd century CE. Her father built the tomb and had two Greek poems carved on the walls, addressed to her.

Hermopolis was the cult centre of Thoth — ibis-headed god of writing, calculation, magic and the moon, whom the Greeks identified with Hermes, giving the city its name. The animal cults here were correspondingly enormous.

Industrial devotion

The ibis catacombs are hard to grasp until you see the scale. Birds were bred in dedicated facilities near the temple, killed, mummified, wrapped, sealed in a pottery jar and sold to pilgrims, who dedicated them and had them stored underground. Estimates for the number interred at Tuna el-Gebel run to four million and beyond, with comparable operations at Saqqara and elsewhere.

It was a religious economy at industrial scale — breeders, embalmers, potters, priests and scribes, all supported by pilgrim payments, running for several centuries.

A boundary of Amarna

On the cliff above the site stands one of Akhenaten's boundary stelae, marking the western limit of Akhetaten across the river. It is a reminder of how close this ordinary provincial necropolis sits to the strangest episode in Egyptian history.

Where two worlds meet

Petosiris lived through the end of native Egyptian rule and the arrival of the Greeks. His tomb does not choose between the two, and neither did the people buried around him: the site holds Egyptian tomb-chapels next to Greek-style house-tombs, in the same cemetery, over the same centuries.