had once been roofed over with a series of even larger monolithic slabs.17
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 391.
17 The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, p. 18.
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Plan of the Osireion.
To get a proper understanding of the structure of the Osireion, I found
it helpful to raise myself directly above it in my mind’s eye, so that I
could look down on it. This exercise was assisted by the absence of the
original roof which made it easier to envisage the whole edifice in plan.
Also helpful was the fact that water had now seeped up to fill all of the
building’s pools, cells and channels to a depth of a few inches below the
lip of the central plinth, as the original designers had apparently intended
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it should.18
Looking down in this manner, it was immediately apparent that the
plinth formed a rectangular island, surrounded on all four sides by a
water-filled moat about 10 feet wide. The moat was contained by an
immense, rectangular enclosure wall, no less than 20 feet thick,19 made of
very large blocks of red sandstone disposed in polygonal jigsaw-puzzle
patterns. Into the huge thickness of this wall were set the 17 cells
mentioned in Naville’s report. Six lay to the east, six to the west, two to
the south and three to the north. Off the central of the three northern
cells lay a long transverse chamber, roofed with and composed of
limestone. A similar transverse chamber, also of limestone but no longer
with an intact roof, lay immediately south of the great gateway. Finally,
the whole structure was enclosed within an outer wall of limestone, thus
completing a sequence of inter-nested rectangles, i.e., from the outside
in, wall, wall, moat, plinth.
Another notable and outstandingly unusual feature of the Osireion was
that it was not even approximately aligned to the cardinal points. Instead,
like the Way of the Dead at Teotihuacan in Mexico, it was oriented to the
east of due north. Since Ancient Egypt had been a civilization that could
and normally did achieve precise alignments for its buildings, it seemed
to me improbable that this apparently skewed orientation was accidental.
Moreover, although 50 feet higher, the Seti I Temple was oriented along
exactly the same axis—and again not by accident. The question was:
which was the older building? Had the axis of the Osireion been
predetermined by the axis of the Temple or vice versa? This, it turned
out, was an issue over which considerable controversy, now long
forgotten, had once raged. In a debate which had many connections with
that surrounding the Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza, eminent
archaeologists had initially argued that the Osireion was a building of
truly immense antiquity, a view expressed by Professor Naville in the
London Times of 17 March 1914:
This monument raises several important questions. As to its date, its great
similarity with the Temple of the Sphinx [as the Valley Temple was then known]
shows it to be of the same epoch when building was made with enormous stones
without any ornament. This is characteristic of the oldest architecture in Egypt. I
should even say that we may call it the most ancient stone building in Egypt.20
18 Ibid., p. 28-9.
19 E. Naville, ‘Excavations at Abydos: The Great Pool and the Tomb of Osiris’, Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology, volume I, 1914, p. 160.
20 The Times, London, 17 March 1914.
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Reconstruction of the Osireion.
Describing himself as overawed by the ‘grandeur and stern simplicity’ of
the monument’s central hall, with its remarkable granite monoliths, and
by ‘the power of those ancients who could bring from a distance and
move such gigantic blocks’, Naville made a suggestion concerning the
function the Osireion might originally have been intended to serve:
‘Evidently this huge construction was a large reservoir where water was
stored during the high Nile ... It is curious that what we may consider as a
beginning in architecture is neither a temple nor a tomb, but a gigantic
pool, a waterwork ...21
Curious indeed, and well worth investigating further; something Naville
hoped to do the following season. Unfortunately, the First World War
intervened and no archaeology could be undertaken in Egypt for several
years. As a result, it was not until 1925 that the Egypt Exploration Fund
was able to send out another mission, which was led not by Naville but by
a young Egyptologist named Henry Frankfort.
21 Ibid.
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Frankfort’s facts
Later to enjoy great prestige and influence as professor of Pre-Classical
Antiquity at the University of London, Frankfort spent several consecutive
digging seasons re-clearing and thoroughly excavating the Osireion
between 1925 and 1930. During the course of this work he made
discoveries which, so far as he was concerned, ‘settled the date of the
building’:
1 A granite dovetail in position at the top of the southern side of the
main entrance to the central hall, which was inscribed with the
cartouche of Seti I.
2 A similar dovetail in position inside the eastern wall of the central hall.
3 Astronomical scenes and inscriptions by Seti I carved in relief on the
ceiling of the northern transverse chamber.
4 The remains of similar scenes in the southern transverse chamber.
5 An ostracon (piece of broken potsherd) found in the entrance passage
and bearing the legend ‘Seti is serviceable to Osiris’.22
The reader will recall the lemming behaviour which led to a dramatic
change of scholarly opinion about the antiquity of the Sphinx and the
Valley Temple (due to the discovery of a few statues and a single
cartouche which seemed to imply some sort of connection with Khafre).
Frankfort’s finds at Abydos caused a similar volte-face over the antiquity
of the Osireion. In 1914 it was ‘the most ancient stone building in Egypt’.
By 1933, it had been beamed forward in time to the reign of Seti I—
around 1300 BC—whose cenotaph it was now believed to be.23
Within a decade, the standard Egyptological texts began to print the
attribution to Seti I as though it were a fact, verifiable by experience or
observation. It is not a fact, however, merely Frankfort’s interpretation of
the evidence he had found.
The only facts are that certain inscriptions and decorations left by Seti
appear in an otherwise completely anonymous structure. One plausible
explanation is that the structure must have been built by Seti, as
Frankfort proposed. The other possibility is that the half-hearted and
scanty decorations, cartouches and inscriptions found by Frankfort could
have been placed in the Osireion as part of a renovation and repair
operation undertaken in Seti’s time (implying that th
e structure was by
then ancient, as Naville and others had proposed).
What are the merits of these mutually contradictory propositions which
22 The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, pp. 4, 25, 68-80.
23 Ibid., in general.
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identify the Osireion as (a) the oldest building in Egypt, and (b) a
relatively late New Kingdom structure?
Proposition (b)—that it is the cenotaph of Seti I—is the only attribution
accepted by Egyptologists. On close inspection, however, it rests on the
circumstantial evidence of the cartouches and inscriptions which prove
nothing. Indeed part of this evidence appears to contradict Frankfort’s
case. The ostracon bearing the legend ‘Seti is serviceable to Osiris’
sounds less like praise for the works of an original builder than praise for
a restorer who had renovated, and perhaps added to, an ancient structure
identified with the First Time god Osiris. And another awkward little
matter has also been overlooked. The south and north ‘transverse
chambers’, which contain Seti I’s detailed decorations and inscriptions, lie
outside the twenty-foot-thick enclosure wall which so adamantly defines
the huge, undecorated megalithic core of the building. This had raised
the reasonable suspicion in Naville’s mind (though Frankfort chose to
ignore it) that the two chambers concerned were ‘not contemporaneous
with the rest of the building’ but had been added much later during the
reign of Seti I, ‘probably when he built his own temple’.24
To cut a long story short, therefore, everything about proposition (b) is
based in one way or another on Frankfort’s not necessarily infallible
interpretation of various bits and pieces of possibly intrusive evidence.
Proposition (a)—that the core edifice of the Osireion had been built
millennia before Seti’s time—rests on the nature of the architecture itself.
As Naville observed, the Osireion’s similarity to the Valley Temple at Giza
‘showed it to be of the same epoch when building was made with
enormous stones’. Likewise, until the end of her life, Margaret Murray
remained convinced that the Osireion was not a cenotaph at all (least of
all Seti’s). She said,
It was made for the celebration of the mysteries of Osiris, and so far is unique
among all the surviving buildings of Egypt. It is clearly early, for the great blocks
of which it is built are of the style of the Old Kingdom; the simplicity of the actual
building also points to it being of that early date. The decoration was added by
Seti I, who in that way laid claim to the building, but seeing how often a Pharaoh
claimed the work of his predecessors by putting his name on it, this fact does not
carry much weight. It is the style of the building, the type of the masonry, the
tooling of the stone, and not the name of a king, which date a building in Egypt.25
This was an admonition Frankfort might well have paid more attention to,
for as he bemusedly observed of his ‘cenotaph’, ‘It has to be admitted
that no similar building is known from the Nineteenth Dynasty.’26
Indeed it is not just a matter of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Apart from the
Valley Temple and other Cyclopean edifices on the Giza plateau, no other
building remotely resembling the Osireion is known from any other
24 ‘Excavations at Abydos’, pp. 164-5.
25 The Splendour that was Egypt, pp. 160-1.
26 The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, p. 23.
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epoch of Egypt’s long history. This handful of supposedly Old Kingdom
structures, built out of giant megaliths, seems to belong in a unique
category. They resemble one another much more than they resemble any
other known style of architecture and in all cases there are questionmarks over their identity.
Isn’t this precisely what one would expect of buildings not erected by
any historical pharaoh but dating back to prehistoric times? Doesn’t it
make sense of the mysterious way in which the Sphinx and the Valley
Temple, and now the Osireion as well, seem to have become vaguely
connected with the names of particular pharaohs (Khafre and Seti I),
without ever yielding a single piece of evidence that clearly and
unequivocally proves those pharaohs built the structures concerned?
Aren’t the tenuous links much more indicative of the work of restorers
seeking to attach themselves to ancient and venerable monuments than
of the original architects of those monuments—whoever they might have
been and in whatever epoch they might have lived?
Setting sail across seas of sand and time
Before leaving Abydos, there was one other puzzle that I wanted to
remind myself of. It lay buried in the desert, about a kilometre north-west
of the Osireion, across sands littered with the rolling, cluttered tumuli of
ancient graveyards.
Out among these cemeteries, many of which dated back to early
dynastic and pre-dynastic times, the jackal gods Anubis and Upuaut had
traditionally reigned supreme. Openers of the way, guardians of the
spirits of the dead, I knew that they had played a central role in the
mysteries of Osiris that had been enacted each year at Abydos—
apparently throughout the span of Ancient Egyptian history.
It seemed to me that there was a sense in which they guarded the
mysteries still. For what was the Osireion if was not a huge, unsolved
mystery that deserved closer scrutiny than it has received from the
scholars whose job it is to look into these matters? And what was the
burial in the desert of twelve high-prowed, seagoing ships if not also a
mystery that cried out, loudly, for solution?
It was the burial place of those ships I was now crossing the cemeteries
of the jackal gods to see:
The Guardian, London, 21 December 1991: A fleet of 5000-year-old royal ships
has been found buried eight miles from the Nile. American and Egyptian
archaeologists discovered the 12 large wooden boats at Abydos ... Experts said
the boats—which are 50 to 60 feet long—are about 5000 years old, making them
Egypt’s earliest royal ships and among the earliest boats found anywhere ... The
experts say the ships, discovered in September, were probably meant for burial so
the souls of the pharaohs could be transported on them. ‘We never expected to
find such a fleet, especially so far from the Nile,’ said David O’Connor, the
expedition leader and curator of the Egyptian Section of the University Museum of
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the University of Pennsylvania ...27
The boats were buried in the shadow of a gigantic mud-brick enclosure,
thought to have been the mortuary temple of a Second Dynasty pharaoh
named Khasekhemwy, who had ruled Egypt in the twenty-seventh century
BC.28 O’Connor, however, was certain that they were not associated
directly with Khasekhemwy but rather with the nearby (and largely ruined)
‘funerary-cult enclosure built for Pharaoh Djer early in Dynasty I. The boat
graves are not likely to be e
arlier than this and may in fact have been
built for Djer, but this remains to be proven.’29
A sudden strong gust of wind blew across the desert, scattering sheets
of sand. I took refuge for a while in the lee of the looming walls of the
Khasekhemwy enclosure, close to the point where the University of
Pennsylvania archaeologists had, for legitimate security reasons, reburied
the twelve mysterious boats they had stumbled on in 1991. They had
hoped to return in 1992 to continue the excavations, but there had been
various hitches and, in 1993, the dig was still being postponed.
In the course of my research O’Connor had sent me the official report
of the 1991 season,30 mentioning in passing that some of the boats might
have been as much as 72 feet in length.31 He also noted that the boatshaped brick graves in which they were enclosed, which would have risen
well above the level of the surrounding desert in early dynastic times,
must have produced quite an extraordinary effect when they were new:
Each grave had originally been thickly coated with mud plaster and whitewash so
the impression would have been of twelve (or more) huge ‘boats’ moored out in
the desert, gleaming brilliantly in the Egyptian sun. The notion of their being
moored was taken so seriously that an irregularly shaped small boulder was found
placed near the ‘prow’ or ‘stern’ of several boat graves. These boulders could not
have been there naturally or by accident; their placement seems deliberate, not
random. We can think of them as ‘anchors’ intended to help ‘moor’ the boats.32
Like the 140-foot ocean-going vessel found buried beside the Great
Pyramid at Giza (see Chapter Thirty-three), one thing was immediately
clear about the Abydos boats—they were of an advanced design capable
of riding out the most powerful waves and the worst weather of the open
seas. According to Cheryl Haldane, a nautical archaeologist at Texas Aand-M University, they showed ‘a high degree of technology combined
with grace’.33 Exactly as was the case with the Pyramid boat, therefore
(but at least 500 years earlier) the Abydos fleet seemed to indicate that a
people able to draw upon the accumulated experiences of a long tradition
27 Guardian, London, 21 December 1991.
28 David O’Connor, ‘Boat Graves and Pyramid Origins’, in Expedition, volume 33, No. 3,