Seti I

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.

The temple at Abydos is the finest surviving relief carving of the New Kingdom and it is also an argument. Seven sanctuaries stand side by side for Osiris, Isis, Horus, Amun, Ra-Horakhty, Ptah and the king himself, which places the reigning pharaoh among the great gods rather than merely before them. In a corridor is the Abydos king list, seventy six cartouches naming his predecessors in order, and the order has holes in it: Hatshepsut is absent, and so is the whole Amarna sequence from Akhenaten to Ay. That is not carelessness. A list of legitimate ancestors is a claim about who counts, and the omissions are the claim.

Behind the temple is the Osireion, a subterranean structure whose central hall stands on an island surrounded by a channel of water, so that the island reads as the primeval mound emerging from the waters of chaos and the whole building as the tomb of Osiris. His own tomb in the Valley of the Kings is the longest and most completely decorated there, carrying the Book of Gates through its corridors, and the ceiling of its burial chamber holds the earliest complete Egyptian astronomical scheme to survive, with the decan stars, the northern constellations and the figures that govern the hours of the night.