Position 43 - The Temple Of Sethos I—view South— West To Its Dismantled Front—abydos

As we are looking southwestward here, the river is on our right. Cairo is about 335 miles away on the same side (Map 3) and Thebes is less than a hundred miles distant on our left, if we measure around the great bend in the Nile, which we are now fast approaching in our ascent of the river. Now if you have clearly in mind where you are, I will answer that question, Why should this temple have been built out here in this desert waste? We are standing, to be sure, as we stood at Gizeh, on the margin of the desert, but there was an ancient town in this valley behind us, though it was of no political importance and would never have been the reason for the erection of such a temple as this.

The priests of the modest prehistoric sanctuary of this place, early affirmed that Osiris, the god of the dead and great protector of every soul in the hereafter was buried here, and already at a remote date, the ground on which you stand was the holiest spot in Egypt, as the burial place of Osiris. It was indeed the “holy sepulcher” of Egypt. Every great man desired to be buried here, or, if that were impossible, he erected a tablet on the wall of the ancient Osiris temple, the ruins of which are just out of range on our right. On this tablet he recorded his name and titles and a prayer to Osiris for protection and maintenance in the hereafter.

Officials of the court and government took advantage of every official journey that brought them to or past Abydos, to stop and erect here such a tablet for themselves or the deceased members of their families; for it was thought that Osiris was sure to give attention to these petitions erected in the vicinity of his tomb. Thus a certain official under Sesostris III, about 1900 years before Christ, whose name was Sisatet, says on his tablet erected not far from where we stand: “I came to Abydos together with the chief treasurer, Ikhernofret, to carve a statue of Osiris, when the King of Egypt, Sesostris III, journeyed to overthrow Kush (Ethiopia), in the year 19.” This tablet is now in Geneva, Switzerland.

Now, it is hardly possible that the chief treasurer, Ikernofret, mentioned by Sisatet, should have visited Abydos without leaving some record of his visit, and sure enough an examination discloses his tablet also, now reposing in the Berlin Museum; and upon it Sisatet is also referred to. The two had stopped here to make a statue of Osiris by command of the king, as he passed here on his way southward to invade Ethiopia in the nineteenth year of his reign.

This is the only record we possess of such a campaign in the nineteenth year of this king, and you will thus see how important for Egyptian history these memorial tablets are, especially as in course of centuries they gradually increased in number, until they crowded the temple enclosure just north of us here, in hundreds upon hundreds. They were taken away by Mariette and most of them now rest in the museum at Cairo.

The temple before us carries us into the great Theban period, to which the tombs at Assiut introduced us. It was built by Sethos I, the first great king of the 19th Dynasty, who ruled in the 14th century B. C. We have seen his face in the flesh in the museum at Cairo, and we remember from our study of his history, his war in Syria. The architecture of this temple is not as imposing as that which we shall find at Thebes, but it is justly noted for the exquisite reliefs which it contains, and these we shall later view. This is not the front of the temple which we have before us, but merely the dismantled and altered back wall of the second court of the temple (see Plan 7).

You see at each end of the row of pillars the side walls of this second court; its front wall, which would be out of range on our right, has disappeared, as well as the entire first court and its front, which once formed the real facade of the temple. Hence we must not judge of the architecture of the building from this rear wall of the second court. When you have seen the temples of Medinet Habu (Position 77) and Edfu (Position 82), you will know what was the character of the lost façade of the temple before us; so that we shall not spend any time upon this point now.

Behind that row of pillars are seven doors which once formed the entrances to seven aisles, leading through the temple to seven shrines, of which the middle one was sacred to Amon, the great god of Egypt in Sethos I's time, and the other six to Osiris, the deified king himself, and the other great gods of Egypt. It is therefore a kind of pantheon, and as such, the names of all the nomes, or old baronial divisions of Egypt, are engraved in order by the doors. Thus all Egypt is here recorded as participating in the service of her great gods.

The temple had also another function as a shrine of the earliest Pharaohs, in which their worship was practiced; but of this last particular we shall have more to say when we have entered the building. Sethos never lived to see his temple finished, but on that wall facing us, behind the pillars, is a long inscription of his son, Ramses II, in which he narrates how he found the temple unfinished, with its columns lying on the ground and the blocks intended for the walls, prostrate in the filth; while the temple income which Sethos had founded for the support of the temple and its service, was neglected and disregarded.

Ramses tells how he completed the structure and restored its diverted income; and one of the things which he did was to wall up five of the seven doors, which Sethos had constructed behind the pillars; you can clearly see the masonry filling of the three on this side of the centre as we now stand.

Ramses left only the central door and the furthest one of the three on the other side of the centre (see Plan 7). His long inscription, from which we have given some few of the facts it contains, was then engraved upon the wall thus obtained. It contains no less than 116 lines.

That central door gives access to a wide colonnaded hall, that is, a hall, the roof of which is supported upon columns, and usually called a hypostyle hall. The roofing blocks which rest upon the columns in the first hall are to be seen from here, above the wall behind the pillars. There is a second hypostyle hall behind the first; and in this second hall we are now about to stand. Turn to the plan and note the location of both of these halls with their rows of pillars. Then find the red lines numbered 44, which show the position we are about to take in the second hall and the direction in which we are to be looking.