Ruins🔺 Pyramid & tombAntiquity
Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa
The catacombs show how Alexandria’s inhabitants interwove different religious and artistic traditions. The nineteenth-century list of medieval wonders included this much older burial site without a strict chronological boundary.
Photo: Bilal Detailz · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Facts
- Place
- Alexandria, Egypt
- Civilisation / patron
- Roman Egypt
- Built
- c. 100 – 200
- Status
- Ruins
- Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages
History
The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa were cut into the rock as an underground funerary complex in the Roman period. A spiral staircase leads to burial chambers and a room for memorial meals. Reliefs and statues combine Egyptian funerary symbols with Greco-Roman forms. The complex was rediscovered in 1900 and is partly accessible, although groundwater continues to make its preservation difficult.
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