Restoration of the Traditional Gods: Sety I’s Abydos Temple

Destruction of Akhenaten’s monuments continued in the 19th Dynasty, and restoration of the old cults included the construction of new monuments to Egypt’s gods. At Abydos, the important cult center for Osiris, the god who judged all in the afterlife, Sety I built a large temple to the south of the earlier Kom el-Sultan temple to Khentiamentiu/Osiris (in which the earliest artifacts are from Early Dynastic times) (see Figure 8.11). Sety’s temple, which was worked on by Rameses II, was cleared

Figure 8.11 Abydos, plan of the temple of Sety I/Rameses II. Source: R. H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000, p. 147

In the 19th century by Auguste Mariette. To the north of his father’s temple, Rameses also built for himself a comparable but smaller temple decorated on the outside with scenes of his Battle at Qadesh.

Sety I’s Abydos temple originally had two forecourts, with a large pylon fronting the first one, next to which was a large block of long narrow storerooms. These structures are in ruins today and the entrance to the present temple begins at the second portico. Behind this portico are two transverse hypostyle halls, with seven chapels in the rear of the temple dedicated to the deified Sety I, and to Ptah, Ra-Horakhty, Amen, Osiris, Isis, and Horus - the most important state gods. Behind these chapels are rooms dedicated to Osiris, Isis, and Horus, the largest of which is a columned hall with reliefs of the king making offerings to Osiris. The ground plan of the temple forms an unusual “L,” with an addition to the south of the seven chapels including chapels of two important Memphite gods, Nefertem and Ptah-Sokar. In this area of the temple is Sety’s famous king list, which excludes the “illegitimate” rulers of the Amarna Period and its aftermath.

A second structure was also built by Sety I (and partly decorated by King Merenptah), behind and aligned to the Osiris temple. This is the so-called Osireion, a symbolic tomb of Osiris. Massive red granite piers surround the underground tomb, which was designed like a royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The passage leading to it is decorated with mortuary compositions, as in a royal tomb. The tomb itself was surrounded by water, with a sarcophagus and canopic chest for Osiris’s burial symbolizing the mound of creation emerging from the primeval waters.