A city of the eastern Nile delta, the Greek TANIS, used by the Torah as a chronological yardstick: 'Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt' (Numbers 13:22). ⚠ The parenthesis is one of the small unexplained anchors in the Torah, and it is telling about its audience — it dates a Canaanite town against an Egyptian one, on the assumption that the reader knows Egypt better. Zoan later stands in the prophets as shorthand for Egyptian power and Egyptian folly. Its ruins at San el-Hagar were a major excavation site; the royal tombs found there are among the few Egyptian royal burials recovered largely intact.