Abydos, the King List, and the Osireion

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.