Abydos: the temples the standard circuit skips

There is a blue in the reliefs of Seti I’s temple at Abydos that exists nowhere else in Egypt. A dense lapis lazuli blue, almost alive, covering the gods’ headdresses and the hieroglyphs on the walls with a saturation that the eye has difficulty believing. Seti I’s reliefs are considered by specialists the most refined of the New Kingdom: their figures have an elegance of line that the workshop of Ramesses II, his son, never managed to equal. And yet the Temple of Seti I receives in a year what Karnak receives in a week.

The city that was the navel of the world

Abydos (Egyptian Abdju, “the hill of the symbol”) was for more than 2,000 years the most sacred place in all Egypt, not because of wealth or power, but for a fundamental theological reason: it was where Osiris’s head was buried. The mythology explains it: Osiris, the god of death and resurrection, was killed and dismembered by his brother Set. His wife Isis reassembled the fourteen pieces of the body. The head came to rest at Abydos. From that moment, the place became Egypt’s most important pilgrimage destination.

For centuries, Egyptians who could afford it made the journey to Abydos at least once in their lives. Those who could not afford the trip paid to have their funerary statue deposited in the local necropolis, so that the spirit of the deceased could participate in the proximity to Osiris in the afterlife. The Abydos necropolis accumulates tombs from every period, from the royal tombs of the Predynastic period (3,100 BC, the oldest known in Egypt) to medieval Coptic tombs.

The Temple of Seti I: Egypt’s most underrated monument

Seti I, father of Ramesses II and pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty, built at Abydos in the thirteenth century BC one of the most extraordinary temples of the ancient world. It has seven sanctuaries in parallel, each dedicated to a different deity, and its walls are covered with painted reliefs of an execution quality unmatched by any other New Kingdom temple.

The blue we mentioned at the start. The green of the vegetal crowns. The ochre of the skin tones. These colours are not modern restorations: they are original, protected for millennia by the sediment that covered the temple when it was abandoned and preserved it until archaeologists began excavating in the nineteenth century. The murals of Abydos are the closest thing that exists to what Karnak or the Valley of the Kings must have looked like when they were built.

The Abydos King List is one of Egyptology’s most valuable historical documents. A stone panel bearing the cartouches — the oval name-rings — of 76 pharaohs preceding Seti I, in chronological order. Seti I included them in the temple as an act of piety towards his predecessors and as an affirmation of his own dynastic legitimacy. The list is not complete — pharaohs considered illegitimate or undesirable are absent, such as Akhenaten and the Hyksos kings — but it remains one of the primary sources for Ancient Egyptian chronology.

The Osireion: the tomb of the world’s beginning

Behind the Temple of Seti I, half-hidden below ground level, is the Osireion: a pink granite funerary structure from Aswan that Seti I built as a symbolic cenotaph of Osiris. It is not a real tomb but a representation of the god’s primordial burial place: a rectangle of water surrounded by granite blocks weighing up to 50 tonnes each. The design evokes the primordial waters of chaos before creation.

Today the Osireion is partially flooded with groundwater, which gives it a quality of submerged ruin that is more eloquent than if it were dry. It is one of the strangest and most charged sites in the entire Nile circuit.

Getting there

Abydos is 160 kilometres north of Luxor and 500 south of Cairo. Organised groups almost never include it because it sits halfway between the two cities and requires stopping, arranging transport and leaving the main highway. The most practical option for independent travellers is a private car from Luxor (2 hours) or a microbus to the city of Sohag (10km from the temples), from where a local taxi completes the journey.

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