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The King List and What It Leaves Out

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The King List and What It Leaves Out

Seti I's temple at Abydos carries a list of seventy-six kings, and the gaps in it are as informative as the names.

What the list is

Carved on a wall of the temple's inner corridor, the Abydos King List (or Table of Abydos) names rulers from the semi-legendary Menes down to Seti I himself, presented as offerings to royal ancestors rather than as history for its own sake. A near-duplicate, more damaged, was carved for Seti's son Ramesses II nearby.

Who was left out

The list omits the Hyksos kings who ruled parts of Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, and it skips straight past the Amarna era, dropping Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay entirely. Nineteenth Dynasty Egypt treated the Hyksos as foreign occupation and the Amarna kings as a heresy best unrecorded, and the list enforces both judgments in stone.

The Osirion beside it

Behind the temple sits the Osirion, a massive granite and sandstone structure sunk below the water table, built or at least finished for Seti I though its heavy, archaic style once led some early investigators to argue for a much older date. Mainstream Egyptology now places its construction firmly in Seti's reign, reading the older style as a deliberate archaism linking the king to Osiris.

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