In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Egyptian city where the Ark is hidden is Tanis.
Indiana Jones and the Nazis trace the Ark of the Covenant to Tanis, an ancient city in the Nile Delta. The film presents the site as buried by a catastrophic sandstorm and later rediscovered through archaeological excavation.
The Well of the Souls, the map room, and the Ark’s hidden chamber are all part of the film’s Tanis sequence. The setting creates the movie’s best-known archaeological race between Jones and the Nazi expedition.
Tanis is a real ancient Egyptian site, known historically as Djanet and later as Greek Tanis. The movie takes substantial creative liberties with its destruction, burial, and connection to the Ark. Cairo, by contrast, is a major Egyptian city that appears elsewhere in the film but is not the Ark’s hiding place.