Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa: Alexandria’s Greco-Roman World

In September 1900, on the western edge of Alexandria, a donkey pulling a cart broke through the ground and dropped into a shaft that Roman-era stonemasons had cut some 1,800 years before. What lay beneath that unremarkable street has become one of the more striking places to stand in Egypt: a three-level tomb complex where an Egyptian jackal god wears the armour of a Roman legionary, and Greek-style garlands frame doorways carved in the manner of the pharaohs. On Odyssey Traveller’s small group tour of Egypt, the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa form part of two days in Alexandria that also take in the city’s Roman amphitheatre, the Qaitbay Citadel and its modern library.

An Accidental Discovery

The catacombs owe their rediscovery to chance rather than excavation. In late September 1900, a donkey working near what locals called the “Hill of Shards” on Alexandria’s western outskirts stumbled through a concealed opening and fell into the entrance shaft of a tomb that no living person had entered in centuries. Archaeologists from the Egyptian Antiquities Service, already working nearby, moved in quickly, and by the early 1900s a spiral staircase, a series of underground chambers, and one of the most unusual funerary monuments in the Mediterranean world had come to light.

The site’s Arabic name, Kom el Shoqafa, translates as mound of shards, and the story behind it says a good deal about how the tombs were actually used. Families who came to bury or later commemorate their dead brought food and wine in pottery jars, but custom held that vessels which had touched a place of death should not be carried back into the living city. Visitors simply broke them and left the pieces behind. Over centuries of burials and repeat visits, those fragments built up into the very mound that gave the site its name.

Three Levels Beneath the Street

Visitors descend by a stone spiral staircase roughly six metres across, wound around a cylindrical shaft that was used to lower coffins and offerings down to the burial levels on ropes. The steps were cut deliberately larger near the top and smaller toward the bottom, a Roman-period construction technique that eased the physical work of a long, repeated descent. The staircase opens into a circular chamber known as the Rotunda, from which the rest of the complex spreads out.

The catacombs reach roughly 30 to 35 metres below ground across three levels, all carved directly into Alexandria’s limestone bedrock rather than built up from stone blocks. The lowest level has been affected by rising groundwater over the past century and is not open to visitors today, which is one reason the accessible upper two levels feel so complete: what you see is close to what the original builders intended people to see, cut from a single mass of rock rather than assembled and later restored.

The Principal Tomb: Three Traditions in Stone

The main burial chamber, on the middle level, is where the catacombs make their strongest impression. The layout follows Egyptian funerary convention closely — a stone sarcophagus niche flanked by guardian figures, in a chamber designed for the journey of the dead — but almost everything carved onto that Egyptian framework belongs to a different visual world. Anubis, the jackal-headed god who traditionally guided souls into the afterlife, appears here dressed as a Roman legionary, complete with a soldier’s cloak and weaponry. Nearby, protective serpents carved in a Greek style known as the agathodaimon coil beside doorways framed with Greek pilasters and mouldings, rather than the columns an Egyptian temple would use.

None of this was accidental or careless. Alexandria in the 2nd century CE was a genuinely mixed city, home to Egyptian, Greek and Roman families who had lived alongside one another for generations, often intermarrying and sharing civic life. A tomb built for a family from that world needed to satisfy Egyptian expectations about how the dead should be protected and guided, while also reflecting the Greek and Roman visual language its occupants used in everyday life above ground. The result is not a jumble of borrowed motifs but a considered, single funerary programme — one of the clearest surviving examples anywhere of how thoroughly these three cultures blended in Alexandria specifically, as distinct from the more purely Egyptian sites further south along the Nile.

The Triclinium and the “Mound of Shards”

Off the Rotunda lies a large rectangular hall known as the triclinium, a Roman term for a formal dining room built around three couches. Here, mourning families reclined on stone benches to eat and drink at the time of a burial, and returned to do the same on later commemorative visits — a practice with clear roots in Roman funerary custom, transplanted into an Egyptian tomb. It is this repeated pattern of graveside banqueting, generation after generation, that produced the broken pottery for which the site is named. Standing in the room today, it is easy to picture a much noisier, more sociable relationship with death than the hushed reverence modern visitors tend to bring to ancient tombs.

Visiting the Catacombs Today

The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa sit in Alexandria’s Karmouz district, on the western side of the modern city, not far from Pompey’s Pillar and the site of the old Serapeum temple. On Odyssey’s Egypt tour, the visit falls on Day 16, after the drive north from Cairo, on the same day as the Roman amphitheatre; on Day 17 the group visits the Qaitbay Citadel and stops to view the Bibliotheca Alexandrina — the modern library that consciously invokes the ancient one. If you would like more background on the city itself before you travel, our guide to Hellenistic Alexandria covers its founding under Alexander the Great and its rise as a centre of Mediterranean trade and scholarship.

The catacombs also make more sense read alongside the rest of the route south. If you are still mapping out the full journey from Cairo to Lake Nasser, our complete Egypt itinerary guide sets out how a day like this one connects to the pyramids, Luxor and the Nile cruise that come before it. Alexandria’s mix of cultures has a counterpart in Cairo, where Day 3 pairs the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization with the churches and synagogue of Old Cairo, inside the old Roman fortress of Babylon. And once you have seen the underground, ancient library of the dead at Kom el Shoqafa, the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina makes a fitting counterpoint — a 21st-century attempt to recover something of what Alexandria lost when its original great library was destroyed.

Few sites make the layered, cosmopolitan history of Alexandria as physically apparent as this one. Walking from the Rotunda into the principal tomb, you move in a matter of steps from Roman engineering to Greek ornament to Egyptian ritual, all carved by the same hands for the same family. Seeing it with an expert guide on hand to point out exactly where those traditions meet is, for most travellers, the difference between an interesting stop and a genuinely clarifying one.