Serapeum of Saqqara

Deep under the desert at Saqqara runs a corridor lined with enormous stone boxes, each cut from a single block of granite or basalt and big enough to hold a bull. This is the Serapeum, the burial place of the Apis bulls, sacred animals of the god Ptah at Memphis, the old capital of Egypt. A bull chosen by its markings was revered during its life, and at death it was believed to become one with Osiris, as Osiris-Apis, a name that in Greek times turned into Serapis and gave the catacomb its modern name.

Burials here span some fourteen centuries, from the New Kingdom to the end of Ptolemaic rule, and at least sixty bulls are known to have been interred. The earliest, from the reign of Amenhotep III in the 14th century BC, lay in separate tombs. Prince Khaemwaset, son of Ramesses II, had the first gallery with side chambers cut, now called the Lesser Vaults. A second, far larger system, the Greater Vaults, was begun under Psamtik I in the 7th century BC and extended under the Ptolemies to roughly 350 metres, with a parallel service tunnel. Above ground, an avenue of several hundred sphinxes, probably laid out under Nectanebo I, led to the site.

Twenty-four sarcophagi remain in the Greater Vaults. The oldest dates to Amasis II, around 550 BC, the last to the reign of Augustus. A typical box is more than two metres wide and high and nearly four metres long; one was calculated at about 38 tonnes, with a lid of a further 24. They were hauled through the tunnels with rollers and winches and lowered into chambers first filled with sand, which was then dug away. After the cult ended in the Roman period, robbers smashed open almost every tomb. In 1850 the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette spotted a sphinx head protruding from the sand, followed the buried avenue and in 1851 entered the vaults. He found two intact burials and thousands of dated stelae that helped to build the chronology of ancient Egypt. Saqqara is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Memphis and its Necropolis, listed in 1979.

Getting there

The Serapeum lies in the Saqqara necropolis, in the Giza Governorate, south of Cairo. The nearest town is Al Hawamidiyah, about 5 km away, and Cairo International Airport (CAI) is about 32 km away in a straight line, across the Nile and central Cairo.