TANIS. 
INTEODUCTION. 
1, Beyond the civilized regions of modern 
Egypt, past even the country palm-groves, where 
a stranger is rarely seen, there stretches out to 
the Mediterranean a desolation of mud and swamp, 
impassable in winter, and only dried into an 
impalpable salt dust by the heat of midsummer. 
To tell land from water, to say where the mud 
ends and the lakes begin, requires a long expe¬ 
rience; the flat expanse, as level as the sea, 
covered with slowly drying salt pools, may be 
crossed for miles, with only the dreary changes 
, of dust, black mud, water, and black mud again, 
which it is impossible to define as more land 
than water or more water than land. The only 
objects which break the flatness of the barren 
horizon are the low mounds of the cities of the 
dead; these alone remain to show that this 
region was once a living land, whose people 
prospered on the earth. 
The reddened top of the highest of these 
mounds may be seen rising out of the flickering 
haze on the horizon, some hours before it is 
reached; that is the great city of San, the 
capital of Lower Egypt. And when the traveller 
has climbed the crackling heaps of potsherds 
which cover its mouldering houses, he sees 
around him towns whose modern names are not 
in books, and whose ancient history is still 
buried in their ruins. Tell Ginn, Tell Dibgu, 
Tell Sueihn, Tell Earun, Tell Gemayemi, Tell 
Khatanah, all these have their past on a still 
unopened page in history; a past of which we 
may see the sphinxes and sarcophagi, the houses 
and tombs, scarcely hidden in the dust. 
• San, Tanis, T’aan, Zoan, these forms of the 
name have each a history of a different age and 
a different race. The miserable Arab huts of 
San first meet the eye ; huts which belong to 
a people whose very nature is nomadic, who have 
no notions of town life,—or civilization, in the 
literal sense,—whose dark and miserable mud 
rooms are huddled together without any plan or 
order, in the most unhealthy flat, with on the 
one side a muddy stream into which they throw 
their dead buffaloes, and from which they drink, 
and on the other a swamp Ml of rotting graves 
and filth. But the high mounds which rise 
behind this sickening mass of dead fish and 
live babies, fowls and flies, are the remains of the 
Roman and Greek Tanis, a city well built and 
well ordered, whose inhabitants show no small 
taste in their native pottery and their imported 
marbles, their statuettes, their delicate glass 
mosaics, and their fine metal work. And it is 
of this city that we know most at present, as 
during the long and flourishing dominion of the 
Western Powers, which gave Egypt new life and 
new vigour, the successive generations built again 
and again on the ruins left by their forefathers ; 
thus the mounds at last rose some forty feet 
higher than they had been when the Assyrians 
and Ethiopians had stricken the place at the 
close of its older history. 
T’aan, the city of Sheshonk, of Pisebkhanu, of 
B 
