Tanis or San El Hagar and Suez Canal Tour

After breakfast, early in the morning at around 7 o’clock, our guide will be waiting for you, holding a sign with our company logo. Be ready to drive for about 2.5 hours to Al Sharqia province, south of Lake El Manzala, where the ruins of the old capital of Egypt, Tanis, are located. Today it is known as San El Hagar, and it is known in the Bible as So-An. It was established at the end of the 20th dynasty and then became the capital of Egypt during the 21st dynasty. It was the birth province of King Smendes, the founder of the 21st dynasty, and during the 22nd dynasty it was the political capital of Egypt. It was a very important commercial and strategic center, but its whole population emigrated and left it because it was threatened to be covered by the water of Lake El Manzala. There was no mention of Tanis before the New Kingdom, in contrast to Sa El-Hagar, which is located next to the western branch of the River Nile, known to the pharaohs as Saaw. 
There are ruins of a number of temples, including the chief temple dedicated to Amun. There are also some of the royal tombs of the Third Intermediate Period, such as the tombs of King Psusennes I, Amenemope and Shoshenq II, which survived the depredations of tomb robbers throughout antiquity. They were discovered by Pierre Montet and proved to contain a large catalogue of gold, jewelry, lapis lazuli and precious stones, including the funerary masks of these kings. In the 2009 excavation, the Egyptian antiquities council excavated the Sacred Lake of the Mut temple, which is considered the second Sacred Lake in Tanis and San El Hagar.

Then drive to Ismailia. Once you arrive, you will have lunch, and after that enjoy looking at the famous Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It was inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony attended by the French Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. In 1854, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the former French consul to Cairo, secured an agreement with the Ottoman governor of Egypt to build a canal 100 miles across the Isthmus of Suez. Nowadays it is the most important commercial route in the world.