Abydos

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Some seven miles west of the Nile, where the cultivated green of Upper Egypt gives out against the desert, a low gap opens in the cliffs. The wadi behind it runs back toward the high desert, and through that cleft, the Egyptians held, ran the road the dead must take. They called the place Abdju. The Greeks, borrowing the name of an unrelated town on the Hellespont, made it Abydos. For more than three thousand years it was the holiest ground in Egypt — not because a great city stood there, for none did, but because under its sand lay the first kings, and, the Egyptians came to believe, the body of a god.

The desert of the first kings

The sanctity came before the meaning. Long before Osiris was named lord of Abydos, the rulers of the very first Egyptian state chose this stretch of low desert for their graves. The cemetery lies at a site the modern Arabic name calls Umm el-Qaab — “mother of pots” — for the field of broken votive vessels that later pilgrims heaped across it, millions of sherds bleaching in the sun.

The earliest burials there belong to the shadowy rulers archaeologists label Dynasty 0, kings whose names — Iry-Hor, Ka, the Scorpion — survive mostly as marks scratched on jars, predating the formal unification of the two lands around 3100 BCE. Then come the kings of the First Dynasty: Narmer, who tradition makes the unifier; Aha after him; Djer, Djet, Den, and the rest, down through the Second Dynasty to Khasekhemwy, whose reign closed around 2675 BCE. Their tombs are subterranean brick chambers, and around several of them lie rows of smaller graves — the retainers, servants and women buried with the king, a practice of human sacrifice that Egypt abandoned within a few generations. The desert at Abydos thus holds the literal foundation of the pharaonic state, the moment a scatter of chiefdoms hardened into a kingdom, set down a full three centuries before the first pyramid rose at Saqqara.

Set apart from the tombs, on the higher desert closer to the cultivation, the kings also raised enormous mud-brick enclosures — vast empty rectangles of whitewashed wall, the largest the size of a cathedral, that seem to have served the funerary cult of the buried king some distance off. The greatest belonged to Khasekhemwy and still stands more than ten meters high, the oldest freestanding mud-brick monument of its scale anywhere; the Egyptians of a later age, who knew nothing of its purpose, called it Shunet el-Zebib, the “storehouse of raisins.” These paired structures — the secret grave in the deep desert and the towering enclosure nearer the green — prefigure the logic that would soon be fused, at Saqqara and Giza, into the single pyramid complex.

At the desert’s edge, in yet another field, lay something stranger still: a fleet of boats. Fourteen full-sized wooden vessels, twenty to twenty-nine meters long, were laid in shallow brick-lined pits and buried whole, their hulls then encased in mud-brick coffins shaped like the boats inside them, their planks of local tamarisk lashed with rope and caulked with bundled reeds. Found in 1991 and excavated from 2000 by the Pennsylvania–Yale expedition under David O’Connor, they sit beside the great enclosure of Khasekhemwy — but they were buried earlier than that enclosure, set down for the afterlife voyage of some king of the First Dynasty, perhaps Aha himself. They are among the oldest planked boats yet found anywhere, the distant ancestors of the great solar barques in which later kings would sail the sky with Ra. A dead king at Abydos was given not only a tomb but a means of travel — a vessel for the journey through the Duat, the night-country of the dead.

Where the god lay buried

By the end of the Old Kingdom, around 2200 BCE, the desert of the kings had become the desert of the god. Osiris — murdered by his brother Seth, dismembered, gathered and revived by his wife Isis, and made thereby the king of the dead — was now held to lie at Abydos. Of all the places that claimed a part of the scattered god, this was the one that claimed the most. One tradition gave Abydos his head; in the fullest version the whole site became the burial of the body, the green wadi running back into the cliffs the very road by which the god had passed into the West.

The belief fastened onto a particular grave. Among the First Dynasty tombs at Umm el-Qaab stood that of King Djer, built around 2900 BCE. By the Middle Kingdom, some thirteen centuries later, the Egyptians had reinterpreted it: this was no longer the tomb of a forgotten king but the tomb of Osiris himself. They rebuilt its superstructure, set up a great recumbent funerary bed of the god worked in stone, and made it the focus of national pilgrimage. The pots that gave Umm el-Qaab its name were the leavings of that devotion — offering jars carried up the wadi by the living to set down at the god’s tomb, generation upon generation, until they buried the desert.

To be buried at Abydos, or failing that to be buried anywhere with a stela that named the place, or at the least to have made the journey once in life, became the wish of ordinary Egyptians as much as kings. Pilgrims crowded a stretch of low desert north of the temple — the ground modern archaeologists call the Terrace of the Great God — with small brick cenotaphs and inscribed stelae, monuments that held no body but anchored the dead person’s name to the god’s own processional route. The texts on them ask for the same thing again and again: to receive offerings at the festival, to “follow Osiris,” to share in the going-forth of the god. A cenotaph on that terrace put the dead, forever, in the path of the annual procession.

To lie near Osiris was to share in what had happened to him — to be gathered, judged in the hall where the heart is laid against the feather of Maat, and reborn. The whole logic of the Egyptian afterlife, the reckoning later called the weighing of the heart, found its geography here; and the rites that equipped the dead to speak and breathe in the next world — the opening of the mouth performed on the mummy and its image — were rehearsed, in the great festival, on the body of the god himself. To be one of the blessed dead, an akh, was to enter the company that travels with Osiris; Abydos was where that company assembled.

Painted relief in the temple of Seti I, Abydos: the raising of Osiris by Isis. Photo Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The mysteries of Osiris

What the pilgrims came for, above all, was the festival. Once a year, in the month of Khoiak as the Nile flood receded, Abydos staged the great drama of the god’s death and return — the nearest thing pharaonic Egypt had to sacred theater, and the closest the modern record comes to seeing a passion play performed.

The clearest account is oblique by design. A treasurer of the Twelfth Dynasty named Ikhernofret, sent to Abydos by King Senusret III around 1850 BCE to refurbish the cult, left a stela — now in Berlin — describing the parts he played. He fashioned a portable shrine for the god in electrum, lapis lazuli and precious wood; he equipped the divine barque; and he took the roles. The festival moved in stages. First the Procession of Wepwawet, “the opener of the ways,” went out as the god’s champion. Then the image of Osiris was carried in his barque out across the desert toward the tomb at Umm el-Qaab, while the enemies of the god — the followers of Seth — were beaten back in a staged battle along the route, struck down by those who took the part of the loyal dead. The god was felled, mourned, purified, and at last brought home in triumph to his temple, resurrected. The great ones who came to take part testified that they had been there, setting up their stelae — but they did so under a vow of silence, and the surviving texts describe the rites out of order and in veiled phrases, so that the mysteries of Abydos remain, in the strict sense, undivulged. What the participant saw enacted was the death and rising of the lord of the dead, performed where he was held to lie.

The festival had real political weight. The barque that carried the god was a state treasure, refitted at royal expense; the king who funded the rite stood, in the drama, as the dutiful son Horus avenging his murdered father — the same mythic role every living pharaoh claimed. To endow the cult at Abydos was to underwrite the cosmic guarantee that the dead king becomes Osiris and the living king becomes Horus, the succession that held the whole order of Maat together. By the Late and Greco-Roman periods the rite had spread far beyond Abydos: in the month of Khoiak, temples up and down the Nile molded the “Osiris bed,” a frame of soil sown with barley and watered until the grain sprouted from the body of the buried god — the resurrection made literal in green shoots, the festival’s meaning carried home to every sanctuary in the land.

The temple of Seti I and the island of stone

The monument that survives most vividly above ground belongs to a much later age. In the thirteenth century BCE, the Nineteenth Dynasty king Seti I — father of Ramesses II, who finished the work after him — raised a great limestone temple a mile and a half from the old tomb, on the low ground where the cultivation meets the sand. It is unusual in plan: where most Egyptian temples drive toward a single sanctuary, Seti’s opens into seven side by side, seven chapels for the gods he honored — Ptah, Re-Horakhty, Amun, Osiris, Isis, Horus, and the deified king himself. Its reliefs are the glory of the place: cut in low raised relief and still carrying their paint, scenes of the king before the gods executed with a delicacy rarely equaled, the figures pale and luminous in the dim halls.

On a wall of the corridor that runs off toward the rear, Seti and his small son Ramesses are shown making offering to a list — the Abydos King List, seventy-six royal cartouches running back from Seti’s own father, Ramesses I, in an unbroken line to Narmer, the unifier whose tomb lay in the desert behind. It is one of the principal documents by which modern scholars have reconstructed the sequence of the pharaohs. It is also, deliberately, incomplete. The kings the New Kingdom judged illegitimate are simply gone: the Hyksos foreign rulers, the queen Hatshepsut, and above all the heretic Akhenaten and his successors of the failed Aten experiment. Seti, restoring the old gods after that rupture, edited the line of his ancestors to omit those who had broken it. The erasure is part of what the list records.

The Abydos King List, temple of Seti I. Photo Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Directly behind the temple, and far older in feeling, lies the Osireion. Reached down a long descending passage, it is a massive subterranean hall built of enormous blocks of rose granite, deliberately archaic — its huge unadorned piers echo the megalithic temples of the Old Kingdom though it was built in Seti’s reign. At its heart is a stone platform, an island, set within a channel cut to fill with water from the surrounding ground. The arrangement is cosmological: the island is the primeval mound, the first dry land to rise from the waters of Nun at the world’s making, and the encircling water is that primal sea. Built as the symbolic tomb and cenotaph of Osiris bound to Seti’s own name, it was an artificial grave for the god set in the water table itself, so that the lord who returns from death lay forever on his mound amid the waters of creation. Today the Aswan dams have raised the groundwater and the channel stands flooded, the granite island half-drowned — closer, perhaps, to its makers’ intention than they ever saw it.

The Osireion, the subterranean cenotaph of Osiris behind the temple of Seti I. Photo Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Ruin, excavation, and a longer past

When the old religion faded, Abydos slid out of cult and into ruin. The temple silted up; the desert reclaimed the tombs of the first kings; the field of pots was picked over by sebbakhin and treasure-hunters. The Osireion was lost from view until Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray cleared its upper reaches in 1902–1903, and it was fully excavated only in the 1910s and 1920s, by Édouard Naville and then by Henri Frankfort, who fixed its date to Seti I.

It was at Umm el-Qaab, though, that Abydos rewrote the chronology of Egypt itself. Émile Amélineau dug there destructively in the 1890s, more plunderer than excavator, scattering what he did not sell. Petrie followed and reworked the same ravaged ground far more carefully at the turn of the century, sifting Amélineau’s spoil heaps and recovering the small inscribed labels and clay seal-impressions that put names, and an order, to the kings of the first two dynasties. From a single broken-up cemetery he assembled a king-list older than any carved one — and showed that the rulers Seti had honored on his temple wall had genuinely lived and ruled, in roughly the sequence the priests remembered. Since the 1970s the German Archaeological Institute, long under Günter Dreyer, has excavated the cemetery anew. Tomb U-j, the grave of a Dynasty 0 ruler, yielded scores of small ivory and bone labels incised with some of the earliest writing known anywhere — pushing the origins of the Egyptian script, and of the Egyptian state, back before 3200 BCE, well before the age of the pyramids.

So the modern record and the ancient belief end by pointing the same way. The Egyptians held that the road of the dead ran up the wadi at Abydos because the first king, the god Osiris, had gone that way before them, and they buried their kings and longed to be buried where he lay. The excavator’s trench found, at the head of that same wadi, the actual graves of the first kings of Egypt — and in one of them, the scratched beginnings of history. Both readings converge on the low desert behind the bend of the Nile: the one place where the Egyptians believed their world had begun, and where, it turns out, a great deal of it actually did.

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→ Related: Osiris · Isis · The Ennead · The Egyptians · Ancient Egypt · Akhenaten · Saqqara · Memphis · Thebes · Anubis · Duat · Maat · Ra · Atum · Ptah · Horus · Seth · Thoth · Heliopolis · Pyramid Texts · Coffin Texts · Weighing Of The Heart · Opening Of The Mouth · Ka Egyptian Soul · Ba Egyptian Soul