The Apis bull of Memphis and the galleries of the Saqqara Serapeum

Among the sacred animals of Egypt, the Apis bull was perhaps the most famous in the ancient world. Unlike cats or ibises, venerated as species, Apis was a single living animal, chosen for particular markings and kept in the temple of Memphis as a manifestation of the god. His death opened a period of public mourning and the search for a successor, in a cycle that was repeated for more than two thousand years.

A god in the form of a bull

The cult is attested at the very beginning of Egyptian history: Apis appears in documents of the First Dynasty, and later texts call him the «herald» of Ptah, the creator god of Memphis. The bull lived in an enclosure near the temple, where the faithful could watch him, and his movements were interpreted as oracular signs. After death, the deified animal was united with Osiris, becoming Osiris-Apis, in Egyptian Wesir-Hapi.

From this very form arose, at the beginning of the Ptolemaic age, Serapis, a deity promoted by Ptolemy I to unite Greeks and Egyptians in a common cult. Serapis, however, had the appearance of a bearded god of Greek type, similar to Zeus or Hades, and his link with the bull survived mainly in his name and in the theology of the priests.

The markings of the sacred bull

Herodotus, in the third book of his Histories, describes the signs that distinguished Apis: a black coat, a white mark on the forehead, the figure of an eagle on the back, double hairs in the tail and the image of a scarab under the tongue. The historian adds that his mother conceived him by means of a ray descending from heaven. Egyptian depictions partly confirm the description, showing a black bull with a white triangle on the forehead and a sun disc between the horns.

Herodotus also relates that the Persian king Cambyses, having conquered Egypt in 525 BC, mortally wounded the sacred bull out of contempt. Modern historians treat this version with caution, because a stela from the Serapeum records the regular burial of an Apis precisely during the reign of Cambyses. The story probably reflected the hostility of the Egyptians towards their foreign rulers.

Mariette's discovery

The dead bulls were mummified and buried in the necropolis of Saqqara. Under Ramesses II his son Khaemwaset, high priest of Ptah, reorganised the tombs into underground galleries, which were later enlarged from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty onwards. The great side chambers still house monolithic sarcophagi of granite and basalt weighing dozens of tonnes. The cows who were mothers of Apis also had their own burial place nearby.

The complex was rediscovered in 1850 and 1851 by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, who followed an avenue of sphinxes half buried in the sand, recalling a passage by Strabo on the Serapeum. Almost all the sarcophagi had already been plundered in antiquity, but Mariette recovered hundreds of votive stelae left by pilgrims, now largely in the Louvre and valuable also for the chronology of the kings.

Apis was not the only sacred bull of Egypt: at Heliopolis Mnevis was venerated, linked to the sun god, and at Armant, near Thebes, Buchis, who had his own cemetery, the Bucheum. But neither of them achieved the fame of the bull of Memphis, which Greek and Roman visitors considered one of the religious wonders of the country and which continued to be worshipped into the Roman period.