Auguste Mariette found the Serapeum by reading a book. Strabo, writing in the first century BC, had described a temple of Serapis at Memphis approached by an avenue of sphinxes that the desert sand was forever burying. In 1850 Mariette, sent to Egypt to buy Coptic manuscripts, a task he abandoned, saw a sphinx head standing above the dunes, recognised the description, and dug along the line it implied. He uncovered sphinx after sphinx, followed them, and by November 1851 he was inside the catacombs where the Apis bulls were buried.
Each Apis was a living bull identified by particular markings and understood as the presence of Ptah on earth. It was kept, honoured, and at death embalmed and entombed. The Greater Vaults, begun under Psamtik I, hold enormous sarcophagi of granite and basalt cut and polished to a tolerance that has impressed every engineer who has looked at them; two dozen remain in the galleries, the heaviest around sixty tonnes.
The discovery made Mariette's career and founded the Egyptian antiquities service he went on to run. It also cost the site a great deal. The clearance was fast and thinly documented by any standard, including some that existed at the time. Much of what he removed went to the Louvre, including the Seated Scribe and the group of statues of Greek poets and philosophers from the avenue's exedra, and sphinxes from the approach ended up in Vienna. Only two Apis burials were found undisturbed; the rest had been robbed in antiquity, which limits how much the disturbance cost, but the stratigraphy and the context went with the speed.
What remained of his own record then disappeared twice over. A Nile flood at the Boulaq museum in 1878 destroyed unpublished notes, and his excavation diary was later borrowed by a successor and never returned. The result is that the largest single discovery of its century is documented worse than digs a fraction of its size.
Saqqara has meanwhile become the most productive excavation in Egypt. Since 2018 it has produced sealed coffins by the hundred, the intact tomb of the priest Wahtye, a mummy covered in gold leaf, and in April 2025 the tomb of a son of Userkaf fronted by a pink granite false door four and a half metres high.