Tanis is a city that can be found among the shifting sands of that north-eastern Nile Delta of Egypt...beginning in the 19th century, it’s been the site of many archaeological digs, some authorized, many not...it was in the year of 1866, Karl Richard Lepsius discovered there what is called the Decree of Canopus which is an inscription that is closely related to the famous Rosetta Stone...thee Rosetta Stone...it was written in Egyptian...the discovery of this was a major player in being able to decipher hieroglyphics…a written language never looked so beautiful and mysterious...those markings found on walls and on sarcophaguses and tombs...a lot of people seem to speak to me in hieroglyphics and I don’t know what they’re saying...anyway, once they learned to read the hieroglyphics, things began to come together and much was learned...Lepsius was a pioneering Egyptologist, you know like you and I—that is one who is an expert in the study of ancient Egyptian history, its language, customs, religion, architecture, art and they are also sometimes well versed in the ways of the Egyptian occult...such as curses...he was hailed as a noted linguist and recognized as a pioneer of modern archaeology...it is said by some in the know that the treasures found in the "lost city" of Tanis rival those of King Tut's...in Tanis, ruins of many temples can be found...in fact it contains the burial places of three pharaohs who ruled during the 21st and 22nd dynasties...these tombs somehow survived the plundering ways of tomb robbers throughout the plethora of passings of suns and moons...they were found with everything in tact in 1939 and 1940...inside was a large amount of gold, jewelry, and other precious stones...stones that were buried with the pharaohs to keep them company on their way to the next world where they might be needed—since they were still there, I guess they weren’t needed...there were coffins fashioned out of silver, bracelets, necklaces, amulets and pendants...they even included the funerary masks of these three kings...but they weren’t the three kings of orient...you might think, “Hmm, I’ve heard the name Tanis before but I can’t remember where…” let’s go back to the film ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, which was released in 1981...in the movie, it was said that Tanis was the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, (not true) which had been hidden in a secret chamber called the Well of Souls...Dr. Jones says that the city of Tanis was buried in a huge sand storm until the mid-1930’s and was just recently discovered by a German field expedition working outside of Cairo...this is most interesting and helpful to the plot, but wrong, wrong, wrong...just the imagination of a hungry screenwriter somewhere who probably figured nobody knew or cared about the history of Tanis anyway...even in recent times, finds continue...in 2009, the Egyptian Culture Ministry reported that archaeologists had discovered the site of a sacred lake in a temple to the goddess Mut at an archaeological site in ancient Tanis...in 2011, analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery found many mud-brick walls, streets, and large residences...a French archeological team confirmed mud-brick structures approximately 30 cm below the surface...however, a claim that the technology showed 17 pyramids was denounced as being "completely wrong" by the Minister of State for Antiquities at the time and with that title, how could you not believe that guy?
