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informal zoos. The temple of Thoth at Hermopolis Magna became a sacred safari park, with hundreds of baboons and thousands of ibises wandering around, while the Bubastis temple of Bast was soon overrun with cats. At death these temple animals were mummified, packed into miniature coffins or purpose-made pots, and interred in their thousands in galleries in the nearby desert cemeteries.
    The Apis bull, the living embodiment of the Memphite creator god Ptah, had been revered from the beginning of the dynastic age, but little is known of his cult before the New Kingdom, when the 19th Dynasty Khaemwaset, priestly son of Ramesses II, constructed the ‘lesser vaults’, an underground gallery to house the Apis burials in the Sakkara cemetery. The cult grew in popularity until, by the Ptolemaic period, it had assumed a huge significance. By now the bulls werebeing buried in enormous stone sarcophagi in the ‘greater vaults’, the focus of modern tourist visits to the Memphite Serapeum. At a time when standards of human mummification were declining, increasing attention was being paid to the mummification of sacred animals, and the dead Apis underwent a sixty-eight-day stay in an embalming house in the precincts of the Ptah temple, followed by a series of elaborate rituals (including a journey to the sacred temple lake and a visit to the tent of purification, where the opening of the mouth ceremony was performed) leading to the funeral on the seventieth day. The Ptolemies made a financial contribution to these expensive ceremonies, with Cleopatra donating 412 silver coins plus food and oil at the death of the Apis, son of the cow Ta-nt Bastet.
    The Memphite Serapeum lies in the sacred animal cemetery in the Sakkara necropolis, to the north-west of the step pyramid built by the 3rd Dynasty king Djoser. This is a complicated site incorporating a ruined Ptolemaic temple complex, a sphinx-lined processional avenue, a temple built by the Late Period king Nectanebo, and a series of sacred-animal catacombs and cemeteries including the galleries dedicated to the Apis bulls. The Isis cows, the mothers of the Apis bulls, had their own cemetery nearby, with the last cow being interred during Cleopatra’s Year 11. Further catacombs were dedicated to ibis, baboon and falcon burials, while the neighbouring Anubeion (dedicated to the jackal-headed god of mummification, Anubis) and Bubasteion (dedicated to the cat goddess Bast) housed dog and cat burials. The scale of these animal interments is extraordinary: excavations at Sakkara have so far yielded an estimated four million ibis mummies and 500,000 hawks, plus many domestic artefacts and papyri which make it clear that the Ptolemaic Serapeum was a living community with accommodation for priests and lay workers, a palace for the frequent royal visits, and a library and archive second only to the Great Library of Alexandria.
    A curious Ptolemaic construction, the exedra , built along theprocessional avenue of the sphinxes close by the Serapeum entrance, has yielded a semicircular podium displaying seated statues of the more important Greek philosophers and poets. The statues are unlabelled and in a poor state of preservation, but various experts have identified Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle among the figures. Nearby, lining the avenue, is a collection of statues and reliefs connected with the cult of Dionysos: the young Dionysos riding various wild animals; peacocks bearing grapes; mythological creatures including female sphinxes and sirens. The age of the exedra is uncertain, with some scholars dating it as early as the reign of Ptolemy I, others as late as the reign of Ptolemy XII. Its purpose is equally obscure, although there has been some speculation that the Greek sages and Dionysiac beasts may have been charged with guarding the entrance to the original Egyptian burial place of Alexander the Great.
    Parallel to the native temples and the animal cults were the Hellenistic