Temple of Seti I, Abydos — temple
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Temple of Seti I, Abydos

  • 2 min read
  • 26.183° N 31.917° E

Interesting facts

  • The Osireion behind the temple lay buried and unknown until 1902, when Margaret Murray, working with Flinders Petrie's excavation, uncovered it.
  • The Osireion, about 57 by 13 metres, is now partly underwater, as groundwater has risen into its lower hall.
  • The Osireion's walls carry funerary texts including the Book of Caverns and chapters of the Book of the Dead, and it was finished under Seti's grandson Merneptah.
  • Visitors over the centuries scratched graffiti into the temple in at least seven languages, among them Phoenician, Aramaic, Carian, Greek, Cypriot, Coptic and Latin.
  • Besides the Amarna kings, the Abydos King List silently skips the foreign Hyksos rulers of the Fifteenth Dynasty, who controlled northern Egypt for about a century.
  • The temple was financed partly by gold: Seti granted it rights to desert mines, and a rock-cut decree at Kanais threatened anyone who diverted their output.
  • Auguste Mariette cleared the temple from the sand in 1863, and it was later recorded wall by wall in a four-volume survey completed in 1933.
  • That record was largely the work of Amice Calverley, an artist who spent years copying the reliefs, with funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr.
  • Dorothy Eady dated her conviction that she had been a priestess at the temple to a fall down the stairs at the age of three.
  • The two hypostyle halls together hold 36 columns, and the decoration of the first hall was completed by Ramesses II after his father's death.

Why it is worth it

The Temple of Seti I at Abydos was built around 1300 BC by Seti I of the Nineteenth Dynasty in the holiest town of Osiris, god of the dead, and finished after his death by his son Ramesses II. It is prized above all for the quality of its carving. Seti's craftsmen produced raised reliefs of a delicacy that recalls the best work of the Old Kingdom — scenes of the king offering to the gods, modelled in shallow, precise relief — and in many places their original colours survive. The building, of limestone and sandstone, is one of the finest showcases of New Kingdom carving.

The plan is unusual. Instead of a single axis leading to one sanctuary, the temple has seven chapels side by side — for Osiris, Isis and Horus, for Amun-Re, Re-Horakhty and Ptah, and one for the deified Seti himself — and the building turns at a right angle into an L-shaped wing. In a corridor of that wing is the Abydos King List: 76 cartouches in three rows, a roll-call of the rulers Seti claimed as ancestors, from Menes to himself. What it leaves out is as telling as what it includes: Hatshepsut is absent, and so are Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and the other kings of the Amarna episode, erased from the official memory within a lifetime.

Behind the temple lies the Osireion, a sunken cenotaph of red granite and sandstone built as a symbolic tomb: a hall of monolithic pillars standing on a platform ringed by a channel of water, an image of the primeval mound rising from the waters of creation. Inside the temple, one ceiling beam carries the hieroglyphs that the internet has turned into a "helicopter": the result of Seti's carved titles being plastered over and recut under Ramesses, until the plaster fell away and the two texts overlapped. In the twentieth century the temple acquired a devoted keeper in Dorothy Eady, known as Omm Sety, who moved to Abydos in 1956 and spent the rest of her life there.

Getting there

Abydos lies on the edge of the desert on the west side of the Nile valley, about 10 km from the town of Al Balyanā. The nearest airport is Sohag International (HMB), about 25 km away. Visitors usually arrive by road, by taxi or hired car from Balyana, Sohag or further afield along the valley.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Egypt 35The Most Beautiful Temples in Egypt 7The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Egypt 18The Most Beautiful Temples 95The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Temple of Seti I is a significant historical site in Abydos, Egypt. Abydos is a significant location with its connection to kingship due to being the burial site of the proto-kings from the Pre-Dynastic period, First Dynasty kings, and the location of the Cult of Osiris.

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