Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa

A spiral staircase winds around a central shaft down which bodies were lowered. At the bottom, a rotunda opens onto a triclinium where mourners reclined for the funerary banquet, and beyond it the principal tomb chamber.

The fusion is the point: the doorway has Egyptian sun discs and cobras above Greek pediments, with Anubis carved wearing Roman legionary armour. Nothing else in the world looks quite like it. The lowest level is flooded and inaccessible.

Cut in the 2nd century AD as a private tomb and expanded into a communal necropolis of over 300 burials. Rediscovered in 1900 when a donkey fell through the roof.