Catacumbas de Kom el-Shoqafa

A tomb built for the rich that grew into a city of the dead, cut deep into the rock of Alexandria in the second century AD. Kom el-Shoqafa means "the hill of the potsherds". David Peacock describes a circular stairwell leading down to burial chambers and a banqueting hall, where mourners could dine close to their dead.

Its fame is that nothing in it is purely one thing. The question it answers is what Egyptian gods looked like to people who dressed, spoke and ate as Romans.

By the Roman period, Alexandria had its own way of burying its wealthy, reflecting, Peacock suggests, the tastes of its Greek-descended citizens. Kom el-Shoqafa was designed for the rich but seems to have been extended to poorer people too: there are many small niches for modest burials.

The banqueting hall belongs to a long Egyptian habit. Christina Riggs shows that funerary rituals in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods kept the old themes and structures: the lamentations over the body, the Opening of the Mouth, and a funerary meal after burial, perhaps in a temporary structure near the tomb. Some professional associations even agreed to pay for a dead member's burial and feast. At Kom el-Shoqafa that meal was given a permanent room.

The catacombs were explored in the first half of the twentieth century by the Italian directors of Alexandria's Graeco-Roman Museum, who worked through the city's great western necropolis.

Go down the spiral stair into the dark. Peacock describes decoration that draws on both Greek and Egyptian canons: false sarcophagi carved with masks, ox skulls and garlands in the Greek manner, and elsewhere reliefs of Egyptian gods such as Anubis. Look for Anubis in particular. Richard Wilkinson notes that in very late representations, as on the walls of the catacombs of Alexandria, the jackal god of embalming could be shown in the armour of a soldier, in his protective role, with the lower half of his body in serpent form. In one figure, a god of pharaonic Egypt stands guard in a soldier's armour.