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Chapter 45
The Works of Men and Gods
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE 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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