Sety I must be credited with the bulk of the restoration of the traditional temples, continuing and surpassing the efforts of his predecessors. Everywhere inscriptions of pre-Amarna pharaohs were restored, and the names and representations of Amxm hacked out by Akhenaten were recarved. He also soon embarked on an ambitious building programme of his own. Practically everywhere in the country, and particularly in the great religious centres of Thebes, Abydos, Memphis, and Heliopolis, new temples were erected or existing ones expanded. Among the latter was the temple of Seth at Avaris, a city that was soon to become the new Delta residence of the Ramessid rulers. At Karnak, Sety continued the construction of the Great Hypostyle Hall begun by Horemheb, which was connected with his own mortuary temple at Abd el-Qurna, directly opposite Karnak on the west bank of the Nile. Together with Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri, which he restored, these buildings provided a splendid new setting for the important annual Beautiful Feast of the Valley, during which Amun of Karnak visited the gods of the west bank and people came to the tombs of their deceased relatives to eat, drink, and be merry in their company. At Abydos Sety I built a magnificent cenotaph temple for the god Osiris, following Middle Kingdom and early i8th-Dynasty examples. The famous king-list in this temple, a list of the royal ancestors participating in the offering cult for Osiris, provides the first evidence that the Amarna episode was now completely obliterated from official records. In the list Amenhotep III is directly followed by Horemheb, and other sources indicate that the regnal years of the kings from Akhenaten to Ay were added to those of Horemheb.
Sety’s building programme was made possible because he reopened several old quarries and mines, including those in Sinai, and also because, like his predecessors, he raided Nubia for captives who could be employed as cheap labour. Security was another reason for these Nubian campaigns, for the finances for his building projects came from the exploitation of gold mines both there and in the Eastern Desert. The mines in the latter area in particular were worked on behalf of Sety’s great Osiris temple at Abydos; in regnal year 9 the road leading to them was provided with a resting-place, a newly dug well, and a small temple. In Nubia there was a failed attempt to sink a new well to make the more profitable mines in some of the remoter areas accessible.
Further resources had previously come from the Egyptian territories in Palestine and Syria and it was now essential to reassert Egyptian authority over these areas. Sety began in his regnal year i with a relatively small-scale campaign against the Shasu in southern Palestine, soon followed by military expeditions further north. In a later war he moved into territory held at the time by the Hittites and managed to reconquer Qadesh, which in turn prompted Amurru to defect to the Egyptian side. The result was a war with the Hittites during which both vassal states were lost again, followed by a period of guarded peace. Sety I was also the first king to have to face incursions by Libyan tribes along the western border of the Delta. These tribes, who appear to have been motivated primarily by famine, were to continue to cause problems throughout the rest of the New Kingdom, but little is known about this first attempt to settle in Egypt, other than the fact that Sety’s campaign against them probably took place before his confrontation with the Hittites.
The reliefs on the northern exterior wall of the Great Hypostyle Hall documenting the Libyan and Syrian campaigns are in a new, much more realistic style, which, despite a few precursors from the time of Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, was clearly influenced by the realism of the Amama style. More than the traditional scenes of slaying the enemy with their strong symbolic content, these battle reliefs create the feeling that we are looking at a real, historical event. An important role in these reliefs is played by a ‘group-marshaller and fan-bearer’ called Mehy (short for Amenemheb, Horemheb, or some similar name), who accompanies Sety in a number of scenes. It is unlikely that this man was ever more than a trusted military officer who perhaps conducted some of the campaigns instead of the king himself, but Sety’s successor Rameses II (1279-1213 bc), eager to stress his own role on the battlefield during the reign of his father, had Mehy’s names and figures erased and in some cases replaced by his own as crown prince.
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