Quetzalcoatl and Osiris. Sometimes there are fierce internal conflicts
within these groups, and perhaps struggles for power: the battles
between Seth and Horus, and between Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl are
obvious examples. Moreover, whether the mythical events unfold in
Central America, or in the Andes, or in Egypt, the upshot is also always
pretty much the same: the civilizer is eventually plotted against and
either driven out or killed.
The myths say that Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha never came back
(although, as we have seen, their return to the Americas was expected at
the time of the Spanish conquest). Osiris, on the other hand, did come
back. Although he was murdered by Set soon after the completion of his
worldwide mission to make men ‘give up their savagery’, he won eternal
life through his resurrection in the constellation of Orion as the allpowerful god of the dead. Thereafter, judging souls and providing an
immortal example of responsible and benevolent kingship, he dominated
the religion (and the culture) of Ancient Egypt for the entire span of its
known history.
30 Ibid., p. 2.
31 Ibid., 2-11. For Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha see Parts II and III. Interestingly enough,
Osiris was said to have been accompanied on his civilizing mission by two ‘openers of
the way’: (Diodorus Siculus page 57), ‘Anubis and Macedo, Anubis wearing a dog’s skin
and Macedo the fore-parts of a wolf ...’
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Serene stability
Who can guess what the civilizations of the Andes and of Mexico might
have achieved if they too had benefited from such powerful symbolic
continuity. In this respect, however, Egypt is unique. Indeed, although the
Pyramid Texts and other archaic sources recognize a period of disruption
and attempted usurpation by Set (and his seventy-two ‘precessional’
conspirators), they also depict the transition to the reigns of Horus, Thoth
and the later divine pharaohs as being relatively smooth and inevitable.
This transition was mimicked, through thousands of years, by the
mortal kings of Egypt. From the beginning to the end, they saw
themselves as the lineal descendants and living representatives of Horus,
son of Osiris. As generation succeeded generation, it was supposed that
each deceased pharaoh was reborn in the sky as ‘an Osiris’ and that each
successor to the throne became a ‘Horus’.32
This simple, refined, and stable scheme was already fully evolved and
in place at the beginning of the First Dynasty— around 3100 BC.33 Scholars
accept this; the majority also accept that what we are dealing with here is
a highly developed and sophisticated religion.34 Strangely, very few
Egyptologists or archaeologists have questioned where and when this
religion took shape.
Is it not to defy logic to suppose that well-rounded social and
metaphysical ideas like those of the Osiris cult sprung up fully formed in
3100 BC, or that they could have taken such perfect shape in the 300
years which Egyptologists sometimes grudgingly allow for them to have
done so?35 There must have been a far longer period of development than
that, spread over several thousands rather than several hundreds of
years. Moreover, as we have seen, every surviving record in which the
Ancient Egyptians speak directly about their past asserts that their
civilization was a legacy of ‘the gods’ who were ‘the first to hold sway in
Egypt’.36
The records are not internally consistent: some attribute much greater
antiquity to the civilization of Egypt than others. All, however, clearly and
firmly direct our attention to an epoch far, far in the past—anything from
8000 to almost 40,000 years before the foundation of the First Dynasty.
Archaeologists insist that no material artefacts have ever been found in
Egypt to suggest that an evolved civilization existed at such early dates,
but this is not strictly true. As we saw in Part VI, a handful of objects and
structures exist which have not yet been conclusively dated by any
32 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 273. See also in general, The
Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.
33 Archaic Egypt, p. 122; Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 98.
34 See, in general, Kingship and the Gods; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection; The Gods
of the Egyptians.
35 Archaic Egypt, p. 38.
36 Manetho, p. 5.
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scientific means.
The ancient city of Abydos conceals one of the most extraordinary of
these undatable enigmas ...
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Chapter 45
The Works of Men and Gods
Among the numberless ruined temples of Ancient Egypt, there is one that
is unique not only for its marvellous state of preservation, which (rare
indeed!) includes an intact roof, but for the fine quality of the many acres
of beautiful reliefs that decorate its towering walls. Located at Abydos,
eight miles west of the present course of the Nile, this is the Temple of
Seti I, a monarch of the illustrious nineteenth Dynasty, who ruled from
1306-1290 BC.1
Seti is known primarily as the father of a famous son: Ramesses II
(1290-1224 BC), the pharaoh of the biblical Exodus.2 In his own right,
however, he was a major historical figure who conducted extensive
military campaigns outside Egypt’s borders, who was responsible for the
construction of several fine buildings and who carefully and
conscientiously refurbished and restored many older ones.3 His temple at
Abydos, which was known evocatively as ‘The House of Millions of Years’,
was dedicated to Osiris,4 the ‘Lord of Eternity’, of whom it was said in the
Pyramid Texts:
You have gone, but you will return, you have slept, but you will awake, you have
died, but you will live ... Betake yourself to the waterway, fare upstream ... travel
about Abydos in this spirit-form of yours which the gods commanded to belong to
you.5
Atef Crown
It was eight in the morning, a bright, fresh hour in these latitudes, when I
entered the hushed gloom of the Temple of Seti I. Sections of its walls
were floor-lit by low-wattage electric bulbs; otherwise the only
illumination was that which the pharaoh’s architects had originally
planned: a few isolated shafts of sunlight that penetrated through slits in
the outer masonry like beams of divine radiance. Hovering among the
motes of dust dancing in those beams, and infiltrating the heavy stillness
of the air amid the great columns that held up the roof of the Hypostyle
1 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
2 Dates from Atlas of Ancient Egypt. For further data on Ramesses II as the pharaoh of
the exodus see Profuses K. A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of
Ramesses II, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1982, pp. 70-1.
3 See, for example, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, pp. 135-7.
4 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 384.
5 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 285, 253.
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Hall, it was easy to imagine that the spirit-form of Osiris could still be
present. Indeed, this was more than just imagination because Osiris was
physically present in the astonishing symphony of reliefs that adorned
the walls—reliefs that depicted the once and future civilizer-king in his
role as god of the dead, enthroned and attended by Isis, his beautiful and
mysterious sister.
In these scenes Osiris wore a variety of different and elaborate crowns
which I studied closely as I walked from relief to relief. Crowns similar to
these in many respects had been important parts of the wardrobe of all
the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, at least on the evidence of reliefs
depicting them. Strangely, however, in all the years of intensive
excavations, archaeologists had not found a single example of a royal
crown, or a small part of one, let alone a specimen of the convoluted
ceremonial headdresses associated with the gods of the First Time.6
Of particular interest was the Atef crown. Incorporating the uraeus, the
royal serpent symbol (which in Mexico was a rattlesnake but in Egypt was
a hooded cobra poised to strike), the central core of this strange
contraption was recognizable as an example of the hedjet, the white
skittle-shaped war helmet of upper Egypt (again known only from reliefs).
Rearing up on either side of this core were what seemed to be two thin
leaves of metal, and at the front was an attached device, consisting of
two wavy blades, which scholars normally describe as a pair of rams’
horns.7
In several reliefs of the Seti I Temple Osiris was depicted wearing the
Atef crown, which seemed to stand about two feet high. According to the
Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, it had been given to him by Ra: ‘But
on the very first day that he wore it Osiris had much suffering in his head,
and when Ra returned in the evening he found Osiris with his head angry
and swollen from the heat of the Atef crown. Then Ra proceeded to let
out the pus and the blood.’8
All this was stated in a matter-of-fact way, but—when you stopped to
think about it—what kind of crown was it that radiated heat and caused
the skin to haemorrhage and break out in pustulant sores?
6 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 386.
7 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 59.
8 Chapter 175 of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, cited in Myth and Symbol in
Ancient Egypt, p. 137.
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Abydos.
Seventeen centuries of kings
I walked on into the deeper darkness, eventually finding my way to the
Gallery of the Kings. It led off from the eastern edge of the inner
Hypostyle Hall about 200 feet from the entrance to the temple.
To pass through the Gallery was to pass through time itself. On the wall
to my left was a list of 120 of the gods of Ancient Egypt, together with
the names of their principal sanctuaries. On my right, covering an area of
perhaps ten feet by six feet, were the names of the 76 pharaohs who had
preceded Seti I to the throne; each name was carved in hieroglyphs inside
an oval cartouche.
This tableau was known as the ‘Abydos King List’. Glowing with colours
of molten gold, it was designed to be read from left to right and was
divided into five vertical and three horizontal registers. It covered a grand
expanse of almost 1700 years, beginning around 3000 BC with the reign
of Menes, first king of the First Dynasty, and ending with Seti’s own reign
around 1300 BC. At the extreme left stood two figures exquisitely carved
in high relief: Seti and his young son, the future Ramesses II.
Hypogeum
Belonging to the same class of historical documents as the Turin Papyrus
and the Palermo Stone, the list spoke eloquently of the continuity of
tradition. An inherent part of that tradition, was the belief or memory of a
First Time, long, long ago, when the gods had ruled in Egypt. Principal
among those gods was Osiris, and it was therefore appropriate that the
Gallery of the Kings should provide access to a second corridor, leading
to the rear of the temple where a marvellous building was located—one
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associated with Osiris from the beginning of written records in Egypt9 and
described by the Greek geographer Strabo (who visited Abydos in the first
century BC) as ‘a remarkable structure built of solid stone ... [containing] a
spring which lies at a great depth, so that one descends to it down
vaulted galleries made of monoliths of surpassing size and workmanship.
There is a canal leading to the place from the great river ...’10
A few hundred years after Strabo’s visit, when the religion of Ancient
Egypt had been supplanted by the new cult of Christianity, the silt of the
river and the sands of the desert began to drift into the Osirieon, filling it
foot by foot, century by century, until its upright monoliths and huge
lintels were buried and forgotten. And so it remained, out of sight and
out of mind, until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the
archaeologists Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray began excavations. In
their 1903 season of digging they uncovered parts of a hall and
passageway, lying in the desert about 200 feet south-west of the Seti I
Temple and built in the recognizable architectural style of the Nineteenth
Dynasty. However, sandwiched between these remains and the rear of the
Temple, they also found unmistakable signs that ‘a large underground
building’ lay concealed.11 ‘This hypogeum’, wrote Margaret Murray,
‘appears to Professor Petrie to be the place that Strabo mentions, usually
called Strabo’s Well.’12 This was good guesswork on the part of Petrie and
Murray. Shortage of cash, however, meant that their theory of a buried
building was not tested until the digging season of 1912-13. Then, under
the direction of Professor Naville of the Egypt Exploration Fund, a long
transverse chamber was cleared, at the end of which, to the north-east,
was found a massive stone gateway made up of cyclopean blocks of
granite and sandstone.
The next season, 1913-14, Naville and his team returned with 600 local
helpers and diligently cleared the whole of the huge underground
building:
What we discovered [Naville wrote] is a gigantic construction of about 100 feet in
length and 60 in width, built with the most enormous stones that may be seen in
Egypt. In the four sides of the enclosure walls are cells, 17 in number, of the
height of a man and without ornamentation of any kind. The building itself is
divided into three naves, the middle one being wider than those of the sides; the
division is produced by two colonnades made of huge granite monoliths
supporting architraves of equal size.13
Naville commented with some astonishment on one block he measured in
the corner of the building’s northern nave, a block m
ore than twenty-five
9 See Henry Frankfort, The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, 39th Memoir of the Egypt
Exploration Society, London, 1933, p. 25.
10 The Geography of Strabo, volume VIII, pp. 111-13.
11 Margaret A. Murray, The Osireion at Abydos, Egyptian Research Account, ninth year
(1903), Bernard Quaritch, London, 1904, p. 2.
12 Ibid.
13 The Times, London, 17 March 1914.
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feet long.14 Equally surprising was the fact that the cells cut into the
enclosure walls had no floors, but turned out, as the excavations went
deeper, to be filled with increasingly moist sand and earth:
The cells are connected by a narrow ledge between two and three feet wide; there
is a ledge also on the opposite side of the nave, but no floor at all, and in digging
to a depth of 12 feet we reached infiltrated water. Even below the great gateway
there is no floor, and when there was water in front of it the cells were probably
reached with a small boat.15
The most ancient stone building in Egypt
Water, water, everywhere—this seemed to be the theme of the Osireion,
which lay at the bottom of the huge crater Naville and his men had
excavated in 1914. It was positioned some 50 feet below the level of the
floor of the Seti I Temple, almost flush with the water-table, and was
approached by a modern stairway curving down to the south-east. Having
descended this stairway, I passed under the hulking lintel slabs of the
great gateway Naville (and Strabo) had described and crossed a narrow
wooden footbridge—again modern—which brought me to a large
sandstone plinth.
Measuring about 80 feet in length by 40 in width, this plinth was
composed of enormous paving blocks and was entirely surrounded by
water. Two pools, one rectangular and the other square, had been cut
into the plinth along the centre of its long axis and at either end
stairways led down to a depth of about 12 feet below the water level. The
plinth also supported the two massive colonnades Naville mentioned in
his report, each of which consisted of five chunky rose-coloured granite
monoliths about eight feet square by 12 feet high and weighing, on
average, around 100 tons.16 The tops of these huge columns were
spanned by granite lintels and there was evidence that the whole building
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