The Serapeum of Saqqara

Sixty-five tonne granite boxes, lowered by digging sand out from under them

The Serapeum of Saqqara is the burial place of the Apis bulls of Memphis, each held to be an incarnation of the god Ptah who became, in death, Osiris-Apis, the name that turned into Serapis in Greek times. An avenue of sphinxes leads to it, and over about 1,400 years, from the New Kingdom to the end of the Ptolemaic Period, at least sixty bulls were laid to rest here.

An Apis was found by its marks. Herodotus says it had to be black, with a three-cornered white spot on its forehead, the likeness of an eagle on its back, double hairs in its tail and a knot under its tongue. The calf spent forty days at Nilopolis before a barge with a gilded stall carried it to the temple of Ptah at Memphis, and when it died, in the Late Period, its burial took 70 days, 68 of them for embalming.

The earliest bulls lay in isolated tombs from the reign of Amenhotep III. Khaemweset, son of Ramesses II, had a tunnel with side chambers cut for them, now the Lesser Vaults, and the Greater Vaults were begun under Psamtik I and extended by the Ptolemies to about 350 metres. They hold 24 sarcophagi of granite, basalt and other hard stone, the oldest from Amasis II around 550 BC, the last from the reign of Augustus. Linant de Bellefonds measured one at 3.85 metres long and 2.32 metres high and wide, and put its weight at 62 tonnes at most, lid included. Winches, rollers and rails moved them through the narrow tunnels. The chambers lie 2 to 3 metres below the hallway, so each was filled with sand, the coffer rolled in level, and the sand dug out from niches at the sides to let it down gently. A stela records 28 working days to bring one sarcophagus and its lid into place, around 247 BC.

The Serapeum was abandoned soon after 30 BC and looted while hieroglyphs could still be read: the bulls' names were scratched off their stelae, the mummies torn apart, and stones piled on the sarcophagi in contempt. Only two tombs escaped. In 1850 Auguste Mariette saw a sphinx's head sticking out of the dunes and followed the avenue to the site. The dated stelae he found became crucial to fixing Egyptian chronology, though many of his notes were lost when the Nile flooded the Boulaq museum in 1878. In 1862 the Prince of Wales lunched inside one of the sarcophagi. The 1992 Cairo earthquake cracked the tunnels and closed them; after conservation from 2001 to 2012, most of the Greater Vaults are open again.