Restoration as a Programme

Seti I took the throne on the far side of a disruption the Egyptian state had chosen to forget, and his reign is organised around repairing it. Names of Amun chiselled out during the Aten period were recut, damaged temples were rebuilt, and the era was described with a phrase meaning the repetition of births, a formula used when a reign is presented as the beginning of a new cycle rather than the continuation of a broken one. He began the great hypostyle hall at Karnak, whose northern exterior wall carries the reliefs of his campaigns in Canaan and against the Hittites, so that the military record and the temple fabric are the same monument.

His own name is a curiosity in that setting. It is formed from Set, a god associated with the desert, with disorder and with the killing of Osiris, and one whom later periods treated with real hostility. The family came from the north eastern delta where Set had an old and respectable cult, and in the nineteenth dynasty the name carried no shame; it is the later reputation of the god, not the earlier one, that makes the combination look strange. Egyptian religion could hold a god who was necessary and a god who was dangerous in the same figure without difficulty.