The religious tensions exemplified by the secret burial of the Gnostic Gospels in the fourth century AD are still rife in Nag Hammadi and the surrounding region today. The town has a majority Christian population—rare, even in Upper Egypt—and has been a flashpoint for tensions between the Christian and Muslim communities for over a decade. In recent times, Nag Hammadi has gained an unenviable reputation for inter-communal violence. In 1998, a blood feud between families led to the murder of two Copts in the Christian village of el-Kosheh, a settlement of some thirty-five thousand people close to the ancient ruins of Abydos. In response, the Egyptian authorities arrested over a thousand Copts, some of whom, it was reported, were subjected by police to mock crucifixions. When the diocesan bishop complained about the arrests, he too was arrested and charged with damaging unity between Muslims and Christians. An international outcry led to his release, but the inter-religious tensions remained high. Little more than a year later, on New Year’s Eve 1999, a quarrel between a Coptic shopkeeper and a Muslim customer escalated and led to widespread looting and destruction of Christian homes and businesses. On 2 January 2000, when the rest of the world was celebrating the dawn of the third Christian millennium, twenty-one Copts were killed and forty injured in el-Kosheh. The dead were proclaimed martyrs by the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III.
Almost exactly ten years later, Nag Hammadi witnessed yet another religious atrocity. As Coptic worshippers were leaving Midnight Mass at the cathedral, on the eve of Coptic Christmas (6 January), a car pulled up and assassins fired at the crowd. Six young Christians and a Muslim policeman guarding the cathedral were killed, and another eleven people were injured. As outrage and violence spread, Coptic businesses were once again targeted. This time, under the eyes of the world, the Egyptian authorities responded more robustly, arresting three local Muslim men and charging them with premeditated murder. One was sentenced to death at a court house in Qena on 16 January 2011. His fellow defendants were due to be sentenced the following month—but nine days later the Egyptian revolution broke out that led to the fall of President Mubarak.
Those watching the events of the Arab Spring unfold in Cairo’s Tahrir Square witnessed a rare display of unity as Egyptians of both faiths, Muslim and Christian, came together in defiance of the regime. Whatever the future holds for the difficult relationship between Egypt’s two religious communities, and for the fate of the Copts in particular, it is likely that Nag Hammadi will be at the centre of events, for better or worse.
THE OCCASIONAL TOUR GROUP which navigates its way through Nag Hammadi and turns off the west bank road towards Abydos soon finds itself, after a six-mile straight drive through the cultivation, at journey’s end. A coach-park (generally empty); a large, open-air café (ditto); and a line of stalls selling faded postcards and warm Coke: these are the inevitable precursor to the main tourist attraction at Abydos, the temple of Seti I. Although the heart of ancient Abydos lies further north, comprising the shrine of Osiris, the Shunet ez-Zebib and the Umm el-Qaab, such esoteric and faded monuments are hardly the stuff of tourism. By contrast, the limestone temple of Seti I is a real show-stopper. It is, without exaggeration, the most beautiful temple in a country of spectacular temples, the most sublime monument in a land of ancient treasures. Its very remoteness—off the beaten track, too far from the hotels of Luxor for most casual trippers—adds to its special atmosphere. The fact that, in its rear chambers, the roof remains intact means that low light levels still cast their magic, lending a heightened sense of mystery to the sacred images and texts on the walls.
And what images! In the reign of Seti I (1290–1279 BC), Egyptian artists attained the peak of perfection in the carving and painting of wall reliefs. The decoration still takes one’s breath away, with its incredible subtlety and sophistication, its beautifully preserved colours. In the innermost chambers, the decoration is in raised relief—with the background stone laboriously cut away to leave the delicately modelled figures and hieroglyphs standing proud. In the front parts of the temple, completed by Seti’s son Ramesses II, the style changes abruptly to sunk relief, with each figure or hieroglyph “sunk” into the background—less subtle, but much quicker to achieve. Ramesses, a great royal builder on his own account, was clearly in a hurry to finish his father’s temple so he could redeploy the artists and craftsmen on his own projects elsewhere.
Unlike many Upper Egyptian temples, Seti I’s sanctuary is built from fine-grained white limestone rather than the harder-wearing sandstone from Gebel el-Silsila. While this finer material permitted the most delicate carving, it also proved a curse for the front parts of Seti I’s temple. Unprotected by the sand dunes which had drifted over the rear chambers in antiquity, the entrance pylon, first court, portico and much of the second court were dismantled under the Romans and burned in nearby kilns to produce quicklime. Some of the finest stone-carving ever executed by human hands ended up as Roman cement. But enough has survived to marvel at the achievement of Seti’s craftsmen, and to enter into the sacred mysteries celebrated at Abydos.
Although Osiris ostensibly takes centre stage, there is no doubt that the focus of the building is Seti himself. Its texts and images, like those in every Egyptian temple, celebrate divine kingship and its central role in Egyptian theology. This was also reflected in the temple’s name, “Menmaatra [Seti I] Happy in Abydos,” and in its radical architecture. The temple’s plan is unlike any other in Egypt, with not one sanctuary but seven. Each of Egypt’s chief deities has a place: the holy family of Horus, Isis, and Osiris; the solar gods Amun-Ra and Ra-Horakhty; Ptah, the god of Memphis and of craftsmen; and, finally, predictably, Seti I himself. A further suite of side-rooms provided space for the cults of the Memphite funerary gods Nefertem and Ptah-Sokar. This bringing together of the greatest deities in the land under one roof, to honour Seti with their presence, was part of a conscious effort to establish the theological credentials of Seti’s dynasty—a dynasty which had come to power not by hereditary descent, but by an agreement between military generals. The theme of dynastic legitimacy is reinforced in a long corridor to the south of the sevenfold sanctuary. Here, the decoration shows Seti’s eldest son, Prince Ramesses, reading a papyrus inscribed with the names of sixty-seven royal predecessors, stretching all the way back to the legendary founder of the Egyptian state. The not-so-subtle message is one of unbroken royal succession from the beginning of the First Dynasty down to Seti I and his son—an ancestor cult with an ulterior motive.
The most curious element of Seti’s architectural-cum-theological programme, however, lies behind and separated from the main temple, across what is now a stretch of desert. Aligned to the central axis of the temple, it consists of a pit containing a hall constructed from gargantuan, almost primevally large, blocks of limestone and sandstone. Originally, this hall was roofed with granite slabs supported on massive granite pillars. At the centre of the hall lay a platform surrounded by a very deep channel which was kept filled with water from an underground conduit. Behind the hall is a chamber decorated with religious scenes and texts; and the whole complex, in antiquity, was reached via a corridor from the main temple, with similar decoration. Finally, trees were planted around the perimeter of the pit. When the geographer Strabo visited Abydos in the first century AD, he had to enter via a gap in the roof, but the building was still in working order:
And there is a well there, situated at a depth, and thus one descends to it through a vault of monoliths, of exceeding size and workmanship. There is a channel leading to this place from the Great River. Round the channel there is a grove of Egyptian acanthus, sacred to Apollo.15
Since its rediscovery by Flinders Petrie in the winter of 1901–2, this strange building has been dubbed the Osireion. Its ancient name was “Menmaatra Beneficial to Osiris,” but actually the benefit was the other way round: it was a place where the resurrective power of Osiris could be harnessed for the eternal rejuvenation of the king’s spirit. In its layout, it consciously combines the form of a Ninetee
nth Dynasty royal tomb with the antique symbol of the primeval mound of creation, emerging from the waters of chaos. The sacred grove of trees surrounding a watery underworld was replete with Osirian symbolism and, in Roman times, it may have been regarded as the tomb of Osiris; at that time, the Mysteries of Osiris were perhaps celebrated here, rather than on the Umm el-Qaab. Today, the god of the watery abyss and vegetation has reclaimed the Osireion: groundwater stands permanently above the floor level and reeds grow in the channel.
Anyone visiting the Osireion or the temple of Seti I in the 1960s or ’70s—especially any archaeologist wishing to work there—would have heard about, more likely come across, the town’s most famous mystic since the days of the pharaohs. Every bit as inscrutable as the Osireion or the secret sayings of the Gnostic Gospels, and every bit as melodramatic as the ancient Mysteries of Osiris, was the woman known to everyone as Umm Sety (1904–81). Locals regarded her with a mixture of fear and fascination, believing she practised magic. More sceptical Egyptologists were nonetheless enchanted by her, admiring her knowledge of modern Egyptian folk customs and discerning the occasional pearl of wisdom in her curious utterances about the ancient world. To tourists, she was an attraction in her own right, eccentric but harmless. In her own mind, however, she was a woman with a serious mission: to guard and preserve the temple of Seti I. Her motive was not scientific curiosity, but personal attachment. For Umm Sety believed that she was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian priestess, and, moreover, the lover of Seti I himself.
The strange life of Umm Sety began (if you believed her, for the second time around) on 16 January 1904, when a baby girl was born to a tailor and his wife living in a flat in Blackheath, south London. At the tender age of three, little Dorothy Eady—for that was her English name—fell down a flight of stairs and was pronounced dead. The doctor was wrong, but the accident had a profound and life-changing effect on Dorothy. Soon afterwards she began to have recurring dreams of a large building with columns, and an adjacent garden full of flowers and fruit. More disturbing, Dorothy would often sob to her parents that she wanted to go home—but, when questioned, could not say where “home” was. The Eadys’ impression that their daughter had a curious inner obsession was confirmed when, on a visit to the British Museum, Dorothy made straight for one of the cases containing an Egyptian mummy. She refused to move, insisted that she felt a kinship with the ancient Egyptians, and had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from the gallery. Subsequently, on seeing a picture in a magazine of the temple of Seti I at Abydos, Dorothy boldly announced that she had once lived there, and insisted that there had been an adjacent garden, despite its absence from the picture or the accompanying account.
Her obsession with ancient Egypt aside, Dorothy Eady was a bright but wilful little girl. She was expelled from school for refusing to sing a hymn that included the line “curse the swart Egyptians”; to add insult to injury, she threw the hymn-book at the teacher and stormed out of the room. Not surprisingly, she had few friends; most other girls simply found her too odd. At the outbreak of World War I, Dorothy was sent by her parents to stay with her grandmother in Sussex. No doubt they hoped that the country air and some physical pursuits would do her good. They probably also needed a break from their curious, wayward daughter. True to form, however, Dorothy struck up a relationship with one of her grandmother’s horses, naming it Muthotep after the chariot-horse of pharaoh Ramesses II, and talking to it like an old friend. Worse was to come.
At the age of fourteen, as she entered puberty, Dorothy’s Egyptian visions took on a more sexual nature. In one, she saw the mummy of Seti I bending over her in bed and tearing open her nightdress. But, far from being scared, Dorothy became obsessed with getting in touch with her long-dead royal lover. One can perhaps understand why a lonely adolescent girl with a fixation on ancient Egypt might have been attracted to Seti I. His beautifully preserved mummy, discovered and partially unwrapped to great public excitement in the 1880s, is that of a tall, distinguished and dignified man. His aquiline nose and high cheekbones give him the look of a 1920s matinée idol, albeit one preserved in unguents for over two thousand years. But Dorothy’s parents were simply bewildered by her affection for a long-dead Egyptian. They sent her to a mental asylum for a time, but to no effect. Nothing could dissuade her from the veracity of her visions.
Moving to Plymouth in 1919, when her father abandoned tailoring and decided to open up a cinema to cater to the new craze for movies, she sought out spiritualists to discuss her other life. In public, Dorothy was the singer who performed popular tunes on the stage of Mr. Eady’s New Palladium. In private, she was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian girl called Bentreshyt, who had been abandoned by her parents (a soldier and a vegetable-seller) at the age of three and brought up in the temple of Seti I at Abydos. At the age of fourteen, Bentreshyt had become a priestess of Isis, and had met Seti I in the temple garden. Oblivious to, or dismissive of, the historical errors in her story, Dorothy Eady had subconsciously embarked on her life’s quest: to return to Abydos, the place where she had once been happy.
At the age of twenty-seven, Dorothy left her parents and returned to London to work as an author and illustrator for a magazine advocating Egyptian independence. This brought her into contact with an Egyptian student in London, Imam Abdel Meguid, with whom she struck up a close correspondence. Perhaps inevitably, the couple married two years later. And so, in 1933, Dorothy Eady sailed from Southampton to Port Said to start her new life in Egypt. In Cairo, the locals called her “Bulbul” (nightingale) because of her singing voice, but her political views about Egypt’s future exasperated and alienated the expatriate British community. Soon, even her husband had tired of her stubbornness (and inability to cook). Dorothy’s own long-suffering mother sympathised with her son-in-law. When Dorothy had a baby boy, she insisted on calling him Sety, after her pharaonic paramour. Thereafter, according to Egyptian custom, she was always known as Umm Sety, “the mother of Sety.”
Motherhood did not, however, bring solace, nor an end to her visions. Seti I started appearing to her again—this time as a living, breathing man, rather than a bandaged mummy. Dorothy’s husband grew tired and not a little frightened by his wife’s fixation, and they divorced after just three years of marriage. Dorothy left their matrimonial home and lived for a while (with her baby son) in a tent near the pyramids. Eventually she found a job with the Department of Antiquities as a draughtswoman, and an apartment in the village of Nazlet es-Samman, within a stone’s throw of the Great Sphinx. Much to the consternation of her neighbours, the strange Englishwoman would go out at nights to pray in front of the Sphinx or sleep inside the Great Pyramid. This bizarre behaviour cost Dorothy custody of her son, to be replaced in her affections by an ever-expanding menagerie of pet animals: cats and dogs, but also geese and even snakes.
Despite her new life among Egypt’s antiquities, her overriding ambition remained the same: “to go to Abydos, to live in Abydos, and to be buried in Abydos.”16 Eventually, in 1952, as the Free Officers were overthrowing the latter-day Egyptian monarchy, she visited the site of her encounters with ancient royalty. This brief, two-day visit to Abydos was followed by a two-week pilgrimage two years later. A further two years elapsed before Dorothy took the plunge and bought a one-way train ticket from Cairo to Balyana, the closest railway station to Abydos. (She climbed the Great Pyramid the night before her departure, to pray to the gods.) The Antiquities Department continued to employ her as a draughtswoman, on a meagre wage of two dollars a day, but the money was immaterial. Her new position allowed her to visit the temple of Seti I every day, and to observe the ancient Egyptian festivals as assiduously as any pharaonic priest.
Dorothy scraped together enough money to buy a one-room house in the village of el-Araba el-Madfuna, hard up against the temple. Her donkey lived downstairs, while she slept on the roof. Her appearance and customs were equally irregular. A twin-set with imitation pearls and a headscarf was her usual attire,
adorned with assorted Egyptian amulets. At her favourite haunt, a local outdoor café, she sometimes appeared with a caged white cat, which she proceeded to feed eggs and milk. Her Arabic was earthy, her English eccentric.
In 1969, on reaching the age of sixty-five, Dorothy was forced to retire from the Antiquities Department. Two years later, her estranged son travelled to Abydos to try to persuade her to join him in Kuwait; but she told him, in no uncertain terms, that she preferred her humble dwelling in Abydos to more comfortable lodgings elsewhere. She never saw Sety again. King Seti, however, continued to visit her in human form on a regular basis. These nocturnal encounters she recorded in her secret diaries. Modest they are not.
To supplement her minuscule pension, Dorothy guided tourists around the temple of Seti I, regaling them with stories of the ancient rites, and speaking of Seti I and Ramesses II as if they were members of her family. (She was, of course, closer to them than to her real husband and son.) She had few belongings—a Bunsen burner, an old teapot and a battery-operated radio for her evening fix of the BBC World Service were the only reminders of her English life—but seemed content with her lot. During the quarter of a century she lived at Abydos, she visited Cairo only once, for a single day. Abydos was where she wanted—needed—to be.
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