San El Hagar is a small town in El Sharqiya Governorate with a mixture of Bedouin and farmer population. Nowadays, the town is famous for housing the archeological site of ancient Tanis that had a great importance during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. It is considered one of the major sites in the northern Delta region but most of the parts of the temples in that area were taken from other temples and tombs of earlier time.
Tanis is a city near the town of San El Hagar, in the governorate of El Sharqiya. Tanis is the Greek name of ancient Djanet. The city was founded at this site in the Twentieth Dynasty, due to the strategic importance of the place that received all the enemy attacks coming from the East. It became the capital of Egypt during the Twenty-second Dynasty. In the 6th century AD, it was abandoned to the nearby ancient city of Tennis, when the Lake Manzala threatened it with inundation.
That city is usually confused by the capital of the Hyksos, Avaris, and the City of Ramses, Per-Ramses. The site is considered the most important archeological site in the north of Egypt due to the abundance of remains of many buildings. In the site, there are structures, nilometers, columns, obelisks, blocks and statues of 7 temples dedicated to the Triad of Thebes among others from the Late Period, as well as a royal necropolis in which tombs of some of the kings of the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasties were found intact in 1940.
The ruins of the city were used as a quarry to extract building materials for other later buildings. Many of the statues and sphinxes were born to Europe and now exposed in the Louvre and Berlin Museums among others. The Necropolis of Tanis includes seven tombs that served as the burial places of many kings of the Late Period. Some of these tombs they were more excessively reused by later kings.