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  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