The cemetery of the sacred cats was on the western side of the town. But the cats do not appear to have been embalmed, as elsewhere in Egypt; they were either buried or burned. Among the bones which have been sent to England naturalists have found none of our modern domestic cat. Several, however, of the bronze cats of the Ptolemaic age which have been discovered with the bones unmistakably represent the domestic animal. Generally they have the small head of the modern Egyptian puss.
“A little below Bubastis” Herodotos passed the deserted “camp” and fortress of the Ionian and Karian mercenaries of Psammetikhos, and saw the slips for their vessels and the ruins of their houses still standing on the shore. Amasis had transferred them to Memphis, in the belief that it was rather from his Egyptian subjects that he needed protection than from his neighbours in Asia. The site of the camp was discovered and partially excavated by Professor Petrie for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1886, and one of the results of his discoveries was to show that it was also the site of the frontier fortress called by the Greeks Daphnæ. What its Egyptian name was we do not know with certainty, though it is probable that Professor Petrie is right in holding it to be the Tahpanhes of the prophet Jeremiah. It is now known as Tel ed-Deffeneh.
The drying up of the Pelusiac arm of the Nile has brought the desolation of the desert to Tel ed-Deffeneh. The canal which has replaced it is brackish; Lake Menzaleh, which bounds the Tel to the east, is more brackish still. The land is impregnated with salt, and covered in places with drifts of sand. There is no cultivated soil nearer than Salahîyeh, twelve miles away; no water-way less distant than Kantara on the Suez Canal.
The greater part of the ancient site lies between Lake Menzaleh on the east and a swamp out of which the canal flows on the west, and it covers a large acreage of ground. Northward are the canal, a marsh, and mounds of sand, and beyond the canal lies the cemetery of the ancient fortress, as well as a suburb which was probably the Karian quarter. In the centre of the site rises the Tel proper, a great mound of disintegrated brickwork called “the palace of the Jew’s daughter.” Excavation soon made it clear that it represented the fortress of Daphnæ, and that it was built by Psammetikhos when he settled his Greek garrison there. For a frontier fortress no place could have been better chosen. It guarded the eastern branch of the Nile, while from its summit we look across the desert, on one side along the high-road which once led to Syria, and on the other as far as the mounds of Tanis. The fort itself has crumbled into dust, but the vaulted chambers on which it was erected still exist, as well as the “pavement” at its entrance.