Exploring the TOMB of OSIRIS

Abydos is a cemetery so ancient that it reaches back to the very beginning of Egyptian history. Long before Imperial Egypt, long before even the pyramids, people were burying their dead here and treating this place as sacred. But there is a major temple sitting in the middle of it. A temple built more than a thousand years after Egypt's first kings were buried here. A powerful ruler of the Egyptian empire chose this place to build one of the most carefully executed monuments of his age. Why? What purpose could it have served? His decision is what this episode is about, and this investigation will necessarily take us back to the beginning of Egyptian civilization. Before we talk about the great temple, we need to understand what Abydos already was. Abydos was the burial place of Egypt's first kings. In the desert cemetery known today as Umm el-Kaab, archaeologists uncovered the tombs of rulers from the late pre-dynastic era and the first dynasty, followed later by the last rulers of the second dynasty. Their tombs were large, mudbrick-lined burial chambers, surrounded in many cases by subsidiary graves belonging to retainers. And while these tombs were cut into the desert at Umm el-Kaab, they also constructed massive mudbrick funerary enclosures closer to the cultivated land where people lived. These easier-access installations were probably used for ceremonies connected to royal burial and commemoration. The best-preserved of these is the enclosure of Khazakhemwi at Shunet el-Zabib, dating to the end of the second dynasty. After the early dynastic period, Egypt's political center shifted north, and royal tombs moved elsewhere. In the early 20th century, Egypt's political center, Abydos, changed. It became closely associated with Osiris, the god of the dead and of regeneration. Egyptians came to believe that Osiris was the first ruler of Egypt, and that his tomb lay somewhere in Abydos. As a result, Abydos became a major pilgrimage center. People traveled here to leave votive offerings and to worship Osiris. Seti I, the Egyptian pharaoh I alluded to at the beginning, ruled early in the 19th dynasty. He inherited an empire that was stabilizing again after the radical religious reforms of Akhenaten. Seti presented himself consistently and deliberately as a restorer. His inscriptions emphasize the re-establishment of proper cult practice, the repair of temples, and the reassertion of traditional relationships between king, gods, and the land of Egypt. So he was not trying to portray himself as a new best thing. He wanted to position himself as the current version of a much longer sequence. By building here, Seti aligned himself with the origins of Egyptian kingship. The temple we're walking through was a major state-funded monument, and is known in ancient inscriptions as Menmaatre, using Seti's throne name, happy in Abydos. As we move inward from the entrance, we pass through what were once large open courts, now heavily ruined. These spaces would have been accessible during festivals and processions. This here is the temple of Seti I, built mostly of limestone, there's some sandstone in here as well. Seti, as you may know, lived around 1300 BCE, this temple would have been put up, and he never finished it. The original plan he laid out, he built a good deal of it, but he died before it was completed, and his son Ramses the Great finished it off. You can actually see the difference between the parts made by Seti, which have a not-so-deep sunken relief, whereas Ramses II, he likes to go deep with his reliefs, so you'll be able to see that. A few of Ramses' cartouches are in here, but also we find those of Seti. One of the great things about this temple is not only its unusual L-shaped layout, but also some of the great works we see inside, including a full representation of the Osiris myth, and the Kremnelekrem, the Abydos king list. So let's go inside and take a look at it. Most Egyptian temples are laid out along a rigid central axis, moving straight inward from pylon to sanctuary. Seti's temple forms an L-shape, with a substantial southern wing that contains some of the most important ideological and functional spaces in the complex. From here, access narrows, and movement becomes more controlled. We then enter the first hypostyle hall. This hall is defined by paired papyrus bud columns, arranged in a regular grid. One detail here has taken on a life of its own in modern popular culture. On the wall are overlapping inscriptions carved under Seti, and later recut under Ramses II, which created a palimpsest. When plaster eroded away, fragments of earlier and later hieroglyphs merged visually to create what appears to be a helicopter and other modern vehicles. It's a useful reminder that misunderstanding often comes from ignoring how surfaces were altered and reused. You can see the raised reliefs here are from the time of Seti. So this whole wall here is from Seti's time. It's actually much better, I would say, than Ramses. See how these are outies? That's Seti. Ramses likes to do innies. Beyond this is the second hypostyle hall, larger and more refined, with 36 columns. The reliefs here are among the finest anywhere in Egypt. Beyond the hypostyle halls are the seven sanctuaries that form the ritual heart of the temple. Instead of dedicating the complex to a single god, Seti built seven parallel chapels, each with its own cult focus. One is dedicated to Seti himself, as a deified king. The others are dedicated to Ptah, Rahorakti, Amun-Ra, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Ptah, Rahorakti, and Amun-Ra tie the temple to the cities of Memphis, Heliopolis, and Thebes, Egypt's major traditional religious centers. Osiris, Isis, and Horus connect the temple to the mythological framework of kingship. Access to these chapels was highly restricted. The southern wing of the temple contains facilities associated with the processing of food and ritual equipment. There's a slaughter court where animals were butchered for offerings. There are storage rooms. Nearby corridors manage the movement of meat, grain, beer, linen, and personnel. There are spaces associated with sacred barks used during festivals. In one corridor, sometimes called the Corridor of the Bull, we see reliefs made in the time of Ramses II. There's a striking image of Ramses and his son, the crown prince, Amenher-Kepesha, capturing a bull to be sacrificed. The king holds a lasso, and the boy grabs the bull by the tail. One corridor in this southern wing contains one of the most famous inscriptions in Egyptian history. For a historian like myself, this is the most exciting part of the temple. We're looking at the famous Abydos King List, a list of the kings of Egypt going all the way back to many, the very first king from the very first dynasty. Some people associate him with Narmer. We think that's probably the equation, but maybe for Aha, all the kings, right, on these first two rows until you get down to here, and very strangely, what do you have? You have Amenhotep III, then it skips to Horemheb. Wait a minute. Amenhotep III, Horemheb, who's missing here? Ah, Akhenaten, King Tutankhamun, aye, the Amarna kings are out. They are heretics. They don't belong on the list, okay? This is promoting those who serve the traditional religion of Egypt. So it goes to Horemheb, then Ramses I, and then Seti. And all along the bottom here are the other names of Seti. So these are all Seti on the bottom. But this is how we can put together the history of Egypt from king's lists like these. Seti and his son, Ramses, paying homage to the names of the kings. Abydos allowed Seti to bypass the instability of his immediate predecessors and connect himself directly to the deep structure of Egyptian history. By carving this list at Abydos, Seti defines which versions of the past count as legitimate history. He places himself at the end of a carefully curated lineage rooted in Egypt's earliest kings and presents that lineage as continuous and orthodox. He wants you to forget the periods where the government was unstable or fragile. This space smooths over that memory and replaces it with order. Next to the Temple of Seti lies the Osirion, a structure so unlike most New Kingdom architecture that it unsettled archaeologists from the moment it was rediscovered. What we're looking at is not a temple in the usual sense, and it's not a tomb in the usual sense either. It functioned as a symbolic tomb of Osiris. Normally, tourists can only observe it from above, but we're going to go inside. The Osirion lies more than 12 meters below the modern ground level. To reach it in antiquity, one descended through a long, sloping passage decorated with funerary texts normally reserved for royal tombs, the Book of the Dead, the Book of Gates, and the Book of Caverns. Their presence here reinforces the idea that the Osirion was meant to be experienced ritually during specific ceremonies tied to Osiris' death and resurrection. Most of the decoration in the entrance passages dates not to Seti himself, but to his son, Merenptah. About 66 years, maybe, after Seti made this, this section here was put in by Merenptah. The tunnel may have been here, but the glyphs are put in here by Merenptah. Why he was interested in it is unclear, but... When the passage opens, the effect is abrupt. The central hall is massive and austere. Ten enormous granite pillars rise from a sunken floor. Each weighs tens of tons. They are undecorated, uninscribed, and deliberately left raw. Between them is a raised central platform, an island, surrounded on all sides by a deep channel of water. The water is not incidental. Geological studies show that the Osirion sits directly above a natural aquifer. Okay, this goes down nine meters, everybody. The builders didn't try to exclude the water. They designed the monument around it. In Egyptian cosmology, this space is instantly legible. The surrounding water represents Nun, the primeval waters that existed before creation. The raised island represents the Benben, the first mound of land to emerge at the moment of creation. This is not a metaphor. The Osirion is a model of creation. It's architectural theology. See the water line you can see here? This is where the water was coming up to and destroying things. So now they've got a pump down there that keeps the water below this level. But in Seti's time, the water was here. The central island is isolated. There's no obvious practical way to reach it without stepping over the water. Around the perimeter of the hall are 17 small chambers, opening onto a narrow ledge. Their precise function is debated, but they resemble side chambers in royal tombs. At the east end of the hall is a transverse chamber that makes the monument's purpose clear. Here, the ceiling is decorated with a goddess Nut, stretched across the sky, her body arched over the world. This is the central hall? Is that what this is? This scene appears in royal tombs, where it frames the king's rebirth in the afterlife. Its presence here confirms what the architecture has already told us. This is a cosmic tomb, not for Seti's physical body, but for the god with whom he is aligning himself, Osiris, Egypt's original king in the myths. You can see her arched above the sky. That's the god Shu that's holding her up. And she's giving birth to Kepri and Anra over by her legs. Nut is the sky. So the earliest representation of Nut in this kind of arching form. We saw some of the Ptolemaic temples, but this is before all that. This is from the reign of Seti. So how do we date the Osirion? Well, the builders left us with some clues. Now, of course, there's the obvious, like in the central hall, we have representations of Seti, we've got his name, Seti's name is here. We also have the name of Meramta, but he's later, so he added into that entrance corridor. But Seti is the earliest we have here. We have no representations of Ramses here. Now some people think that, well, maybe Seti was building upon something older. And they point to the granite here. There are these beautiful, large granite blocks here. The thing is, they're sitting on sandstone, right? Sandstone base. Well, it just so happens that sandstone wasn't used for building in Egypt until the Middle Kingdom. And it wasn't really even until the New Kingdom that it was used in great quantities. And that suggests that this has to be from after that time. Not only that, we have found some sandstone blocks that were held together with those dovetails we've seen before, you know, with the little wedge shapes on each side. Black granite dovetails holding them together. And originally, Henri Francfort, who was here working, he found one of the dovetails, a black granite dovetail with Seti's prenomen on it, Seti's name. And he thought, well, it's not conclusive, though, because this area was broken and Seti could have stuck it in there later. So they dug into one, and I'm not sure exactly where it was. I wonder if it was up there. But anyway, they dug into one. And they found one that was still under all the sandstone blocks. And pulled it out and said, I don't know if they pulled it out, but they saw that Seti's name was on that, too. So that really suggests that the sandstone was put here during Seti's reign. And since the granite's on top, that also has to be from that time or slightly after. Remember, I told you that Egyptians believed that Abydos was the burial place of Osiris himself and that pilgrims came from across the country to participate symbolically in the god's rebirth. Well, the Osirion was created to be the physical heart of those rites. But look at that, you can see where the quarry marks are for this granite. Perhaps they were going to make it into two pieces, but then didn't. Even in antiquity, the structure was regarded as strange. Classical authors commented on it. Why does a New Kingdom monument use construction techniques more typical of the Old Kingdom? Why are the blocks so massive and unadorned? Why is it built so deep? There are no definitive answers to all these questions. But what we can say safely is that Seti did not build the Osirion to look modern. He probably built it to look timeless. When we step back and look at Abydos as a whole, something becomes clear. What Seti I built here isn't a collection of disparate monuments. It's a single coordinated statement, one that only works because of where it was built. Above ground in the temple, Seti organized Egypt's past. He gathered the major gods of the state, aligned himself with Egypt's earliest kings, and presented a version of history that is continuous and made him legitimate. Below ground in the Osirion, Seti went all the way back into mythical time, creating a tomb for Osiris, but also identifying himself and every other legitimate king with the original king. These two structures belong together. The temple establishes Seti's place in history. The Osirion establishes his place beyond history. And Abydos is the only place in Egypt where that combination makes sense. That's what gives this place its power and why I wanted to show it to you. What a fitting end to our season in Upper Egypt. If you love Egypt and missed the other episodes, I recommend you go back to the first one, Ancient Egypt, The Adventure Begins, and watch them all. And stay tuned for our next season on Ancient America, coming up soon.