town or village

Zoan

• Today Tanis

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Events

1. c. 1069 BCThe New Kingdom ends: Smendes founds the Tanite Twenty-first Dynasty

History

Zoan, called Djanet by the Egyptians and Tanis by the Greeks, lies at San el-Hagar in the north-eastern Nile delta, on the Tanitic branch of the river, which has since silted up. Its great temple of Amun was built largely of older monuments, obelisks, statues and blocks of Ramesses II, brought from Pi-Ramesses, the earlier capital about 30 km to the south. For that reason Tanis was long mistaken for Pi-Ramesses itself.

About 1069 BC Smendes founded the Twenty-first Dynasty, and Tanis was the royal city of the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasties. In the Report of Wenamun the envoy of Amun's temple at Thebes calls on Smendes at Tanis on his way to Byblos. Auguste Mariette and Flinders Petrie dug here in the nineteenth century, and in 1939–1940 Pierre Montet found the royal tombs within the temple enclosure, among them the unplundered burials of Psusennes I, Amenemope and Shoshenq II.

Numbers notes that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt. A psalm recalls the wonders God wrought in Egypt "in the field of Zoan". Isaiah mocks Pharaoh's counsellors: "the princes of Zoan are fools"; rebuking those who go down to Egypt to seek Pharaoh's strength, he says: "his princes were at Zoan". Ezekiel foretold that God would set fire in Zoan.

A copy of the Canopus decree of the priests in honour of Ptolemy III (238 BC) was found at Tanis by Richard Lepsius in 1866. Strabo knew Tanis as a large city, while Josephus calls it a small town, where Titus spent a night on his march from Alexandria to Jerusalem in AD 70. In the 380s, by the usual dating, the pilgrim Egeria came to Tathnis, usually taken to be Tanis, which, she writes, had once been Pharaoh's capital and was the city where Moses was born.

Scripture: Num 13:22; Ps 78:12; Ps 78:43; Isa 19:11; Isa 19:13; Isa 30:1–4; Ezek 30:14

Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.

Verses (7)

Num 13:22

And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron; where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak, were. (Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)

Ps 78:12

Marvellous things did he in the sight of their fathers, in the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan.

Ps 78:43

How he had wrought his signs in Egypt, and his wonders in the field of Zoan:

Isa 19:11

Surely the princes of Zoan are fools, the counsel of the wise counsellors of Pharaoh is become brutish: how say ye unto Pharaoh, I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings?

Isa 19:13

The princes of Zoan are become fools, the princes of Noph are deceived; they have also seduced Egypt, even they that are the stay of the tribes thereof.

Isa 30:4

For his princes were at Zoan, and his ambassadors came to Hanes.

Ezek 30:14

And I will make Pathros desolate, and will set fire in Zoan, and will execute judgments in No.

King James Version