A rock-cut catacomb where the Egyptians buried the Apis bulls, each one held to be the living incarnation of Ptah, at least sixty of them over roughly fourteen hundred years. What stops people in the corridor is the boxes. The sarcophagi are cut from single blocks of granite and basalt, about 3.85 metres long and 2.32 wide and high, around 40 tonnes for the body with another 25 for the lid, polished flat inside and out and set into side chambers off a narrow tunnel. They were manoeuvred into place by filling the chamber with sand and digging it back out from under them. Auguste Mariette found the place in 1850 and got two intact burials and thousands of stelae recording each bull’s life and death, which turned out to be very useful for pinning down Egyptian chronology. Closed after the 1992 Cairo earthquake, stabilised, and open again since 2012.
Saqqara, Egypt
See it on the map
