Saqqara served as capital of Egypt, Saqqara remained in use as a burial ground for nobles. Moreover, the area became an important destination for pilgrims to a number of cult centres. Activities sprang up around the Serapeum, and extensive underground galleries were cut into the rock as burial sites for large numbers of mummified ibises, baboons, cats, dogs, and falcons. Saqqara and the surrounding areas of Abusir and Dahshur suffered damage by looters during the 2011 Egyptian protests. Store rooms were broken into, but the monuments were mostly unharmed. During routine excavations in 2011 at the dog catacomb in Saqqara necropolis,
Statue of Horemheb and Amenia tended to favour Saqqara, as Anastasi was more active in the Memphite than the Theban area, and a group of similar double statues (the most famous being the statue of Maya and his wife in Leiden) come from tombs in the vicinity of that ancient site. In 2009, concrete evidence was found that proved beyond reasonable doubt that the statue was that of Horemheb and his wife Amenia from their mortary tomb in Saqqara. In 1976, a multinational team of excavators from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom found a missing piece from a statue in Horemheb's burial chamber that