On a warm day sometime in the 1860s, a young man was tending to his goat herd on the craggy limestone hills near the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri. The man’s name was Ahmed Abd el-Rassul,¹ one of three brothers belonging to an extended family who lived in the nearby community of Qurna. Spotting a small shrub some way from the rest of the herd, one of the goats began to meander down the slope of the cliffs. Cursing the wayward creature, Ahmed followed its bleating, which was suddenly cut off. He arrived to find that the goat had stumbled into a vertical shaft in the rock. Lighting a torch or candle, Ahmed followed a set of narrow steps cut into the rock and descended into the darkness. He paused at the foot of the steps as the flickering light of his flame played over dozens of varnished wooden coffins and glinted off gold. Most likely forgetting all about the prodigal caprine, Ahmed rushed home and told his brothers, Mohammed and Hussein, about his discovery. Eagerly, the brothers went to investigate and decided between them to keep their discovery secret from the other villagers and – especially –the antiquities authorities.
After French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette had brought the scale of illicit digging and smuggling of antiquities to the attention of authorities in Cairo in the 1850s, rules had been put in place to limit its scope. Potential archaeologists and treasure hunters were now required to obtain permission from the Antiquities Service to conduct excavations, and representatives of the Director-General of Excavations and Antiquities in Egypt, the French scholar Gaston Maspero (1846–1916), were present on digs. Yet by taking only small amounts of antiquities from their private cache, the Abd el-Rassul brothers could drip-feed them onto the market, in small enough quantities to prevent the authorities in Cairo from growing suspicious.
However, the brothers had grown bolder by the 1870s; now whole coffins, mummies and royal burial equipment were swamping the antiquities market. Maspero was made aware of the sudden influx of antiquities, and the shrewd archaeologist knew well that they did not come from any authorized excavation. Angrily, he despatched agents to Luxor to spy out the providers of the valuable artefacts, but to no avail. The local community – given that after so many years they must surely have been aware of the Abd el-Rassul brothers’ private hoard – closed ranks and the agents were forced to return to Cairo without results.
The trail of illegal antiquities which pointed directly to Luxor continued to irk Maspero, who finally caught a break in 1881. He decided upon a sting operation, persuading wealthy American journalist and Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–1896) to travel to Luxor and make it known that he wished to purchase antiquities – regardless of whether they had been discovered on legal or illicit excavations. Wilbour did not have to wait long. Shortly after his arrival, he was led to the village of Qurna and introduced to two of the brothers, Ahmed and Hussein Abd el-Rassul. They offered to sell him a (now sadly lost) king list of 18th Dynasty pharaohs inscribed on a piece of leather. Fobbing off his hosts with some excuse, Wilbour left the Abd el-Rassul household and immediately informed Maspero of his discovery. Jubilant at finally gaining traction in his case, Maspero ordered the two brothers arrested and interrogated under torture. Both, however, refused all knowledge of any illegal sales of antiquities and were eventually released.
Returning home, the brothers – marked by the rough interrogation and under immense stress and pressure – began to argue. Ahmed wanted a larger share of the treasure as compensation for the indignities he had suffered in prison, but the other brothers refused. The rift within the family grew, and eventually Mohammed betrayed his younger brothers. He went to the authorities and pledged to reveal everything, presumably in exchange for clemency. He told the story of Ahmed’s lost goat and the initial discovery. He willingly took representatives of the antiquities service and the police to the location of the cache. Maspero’s assistant, Emile Brugsch, was quickly summoned and in a matter of days, for the sake of security, he and his men cleared three dozen royal mummies and thousands of pieces of funerary equipment from the tomb.
Among the kings and queens of Egypt found jumbled together in the cramped chamber lay Seti I, along with his son, Ramesses II, and the empty coffin of his father, Ramesses I. An inked inscription on the mummy of Ramesses II reveals why these august personages had been so unceremoniously dumped together. It relates how the mummy of Ramesses II was taken from its tomb and moved to that of Seti I. Later on, both mummies were taken and placed together in the tomb of Ahmose Inhapy, the sister of the Second Intermediate Period king Seqenere-Tao. Later still, all three mummies (and many others) were moved together to what would be known as the ‘Royal Cache’, where they rested in obscurity until discovered by Ahmed Abd el-Rassul and his goat.
The question of course remains: why was the mummy of Seti, along with those of his predecessors and successors, not allowed to remain in peace in their tombs? One possibility is related to the safety of the royal mummy and the burial assemblage. A crashing economy and resultant famine during the latter part of the Ramesside period saw many of the citizens of Thebes – and also the workmen at Deir el-Medina – turn to tomb robbery as a means of raising material wealth to trade for grain, and also for personal enrichment.² The workers at Deir el-Medina in particular had an edge as their ancestors had worked on many of the royal tombs; it is likely that a list of their precise locations was still kept somewhere in the village. The priests at Karnak may have felt that the royal bodies would be safer if moved, protected from the possible destruction wrought by looters. This argument is given some weight by the previously mentioned inked text on the mummy of Ramesses II, which is signed in the name of Pinudjem, the High Priest of Karnak and de facto ruler of southern Egypt during the chaotic Third Intermediate Period.
Another possibility is that Pinudjem and other representatives of the state needed quick cash. It is likely that they stripped a great deal of gold – jewellery and other trappings – off the royal mummies and their coffins during the move; a move they probably justified by reference to a recent increase in tomb robbery. This argument is given particular weight both by the fact that many of the royal coffins had been meticulously stripped of their golden decorations and by the discovery of reused royal jewellery from the New Kingdom in the Third Intermediate Period and Late Period burials at Tanis.³ Clearly, what came around went around.
In two short days, the cache had been emptied and Seti began his final journey. He was carried with his fellow monarchs to a waiting steamer ship. In what must have been a stirring sight, local women followed the royal convoy like mourners at a funeral, tearing their hair and clothes. As the steamer pulled into the current which would take it to Cairo, rifles were fired into the air in a final salute. Wherever the vessel passed, villagers lined up on the banks of the River Nile, silently paying their respects to the long-dead rulers of their land. After 3,000 years in Thebes, Seti was travelling north one final time.⁴
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The story of Seti does not end with his death, burial and the indignities suffered by his corpse at the hands of tomb robbers and archaeologists. His place in the minds of historians – ancient as well as modern – and in the public perception are equally important to consider. History, like beauty – and far too often, truth – is in the eye of the beholder.
Some Classical historians, using as their source the fragmentary and somewhat dubious account of the Egyptian priest Manetho, ascribed Seti with a completely overstated reign of fifty-one or even fifty-five years. Josephus quotes Manetho in his Contra Apionem⁵ and relates the story of a 19th Dynasty ruler by the name of ‘Sethos’, whom Manetho seems to have mistakenly considered the son of Harmesses Miamun, a king who had ruled for sixty-seven years (evidently Ramesses II, who ruled for sixty-six years). He claims that the power of Sethos lay in his cavalry and his fleet, and that he undertook many campaigns, including against Cyprus and the Lebanese city-states. He also claims that Sethos’ nickname was Aegyptus, and that the land was named after him. This story is largely fantasy. It is clear that Manetho utterly misunderstood the ordering of the 19th Dynasty rulers, and also ascribed to Seti an unrealistically long reign, although his reference to the military prowess of Seti is curious, considering the prominent displays of Seti’s campaigns on the Karnak Battle Reliefs. As a priest, Manetho may have had access to these and formed his opinions of Seti and his reign on their basis.
The Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–425 BCE), known as the ‘Father of History’ (or occasionally, by exasperated Egyptologists, as the ‘Father of Lies’), also describes a highly successful military ruler of Egypt, named ‘Sesostris’, who, he says, led an army as far as the coast of the Black Sea.⁶ Scholars have proposed several pharaohs – Ramesses II, Seti I and the 12th Dynasty king Senwosret III – as possible inspirations for this entirely mythical character. Whether any one king was truly the inspiration remains unclear, in particular given the partially fictional nature of Herodotus’ account. There is no existing evidence that any king of Egypt led an army further than the banks of the Euphrates River.
It was the discovery of KV17, Seti’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, which reintroduced Seti I to nineteenth-century scholars. They looked at the great monuments he had produced, the tomb in particular, and – after the discovery of his mummy in 1881 – the skill with which he had been embalmed. This led them to the conclusion that his was a reign of great prosperity and power, and of artistic brilliance. By the twentieth century, greater focus was on his military campaigns. In his seminal work Egypt of the Pharaohs, Sir Alan Gardiner on one hand declared him a great ruler, ‘imbued with true affection and loyalty towards his father’,⁷ while on the other dismissing much of Seti’s construction work as ‘relatively unimportant’.⁸ Instead, Gardiner and his contemporaries for much of the twentieth century focused on Seti’s warlike exploits and his tendency towards religious and artistic orthodoxy, his piety and his conservatism. More modern scholars, notably Peter Brand, have noted the shadow which Ramesses II cast ‘backwards’ in history, effectively blotting out many of his father’s accomplishments. Brand wrote: “[I]t was Seti I who laid a secure foundation for the Nineteenth Dynasty and re-established the principle of dynastic succession to the throne. His reign was a time of transition that saw the close of the turbulent post-Amarna and the dawn of the Ramesside age.’⁹ Slowly, Seti is beginning to emerge from the shadows cast by his illustrious successor.
Together with these scholarly and sombre treatments of Seti’s person and reign, there are the more outlandish fictions. Among the earliest of these is the fantasy novel Life of Sethos, Taken from Private Memoirs of the Ancient Egyptians, published in 1731. It was written by the French priest Abbe Jean Terrasson and claims to tell the story of Seti’s early life and upbringing by using ‘ancient manuscripts’ entrusted to the author. It follows Seti as he is inducted into the mysteries and rites of the ancient Egyptian religion, which Terrasson mixed and merged with the arcana of Freemasonry. Despite the completely fictitious nature of the novel, Terrasson became accepted as a specialist in Egyptian religion and the novel eventually served as the inspiration for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), which premiered in 1791, sixty years after Terrasson penned his book.
Seti’s links to Freemasonry were further explored by the American author and medical doctor John Adam Weisse, who wrote The Obelisk and Freemasonry According to the Discoveries of Belzoni and Commander Gorringe; Also Egyptian Symbols Compared with Those Discovered in American Mounds in 1880, a frankly perplexing work in which the author argues that Seti’s tomb should be renamed ‘The Masonic Temple of Seti I and Ramesses II’ and claims that the kilts commonly worn by Egyptian pharaohs in sculptures and reliefs were in fact Masonic aprons. The book also includes a series of rather opaque calculations, which aim to numerically link the measurements of Egyptian obelisks to various stones found in or around Native American burial mounds. The author also relates several conversations he claims to have had with Sarah Belzoni, including one in which he alleges that she entrusted several mysterious documents to him. These were documents that she had inherited from Giovanni prior to his death, and which, very conveniently, supported Dr Weisse’s outlandish theories.
It is difficult to unpick the precise purpose of Weisse’s rambling dissertation, but it seems that his intention was to argue against the persecution of Freemasonry by the Catholic Church by claiming that many great men throughout history, including Seti I and Ramesses II, had been the very founders of Freemasonry, and that it had, in the author’s words ‘been the means of promoting civilisation, fostering the mechanical arts, and of holding together the more advanced minds for mutual protection and charity’.¹⁰ Whatever his mission, considering other publications by the same publishing house – which include several treatises on the alleged ancient origins of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, alongside the notorious Isis Unveiled by the self-described psychic Madame Helena Blavatsky and a discourse on obscenities in the French language – one cannot dispute that Weisse’s book was in thoroughly compatible company.
Conspiracy seems to dog Seti’s inheritance even into the present day. His association with Freemasonry at the pens of Terrasson and Weisse have led modern conspiracy theorists to link him with everything from Satanism to extra-terrestrial intelligence, in particular in less salubrious sectors of the world wide web. One of the most enduring of these modern conspiracy theories concern Seti’s great temple at Abydos: it holds that some of the signs and depictions carved into the walls are not hieroglyphs, but rather depictions of helicopters and alien spacecraft. The inscriptions in question were carved during the reign of Seti I, but later plastered over and recarved by his successor Ramesses II. The partial removal of some of the plaster has created optical illusions which some have interpreted as modern machinery depicted on ancient monuments. Several of the images purporting to show this phenomenon have also demonstrably been edited and retouched in order to make this effect more noticeable and trick the casual observer.
But Seti and his works have not only appeared in conspiracy theories on the dark side of the internet or in the minds of nineteenth-century occultists. The link between his son, Ramesses II, and the Biblical Exodus has made him a mainstay in Biblical movies, such as 1956’s classic The Ten Commandments, where he is portrayed by the English actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and in The Prince of Egypt from 1998, where he is shown as the cruel pharaoh who orders the death of all male children of the Hebrew nation throughout his kingdom. He appears in the role of a conquering ruler in the 2014 movie Exodus: Gods and Kings, which begins with a fictionalized account of Seti’s battles with Hittite troops. Seti also appears in the 1999 adventure film The Mummy, where he is advised by his vizier, Imhotep (an Old Kingdom architect who had been dead for 2,000 years when Seti took the throne), and engaged in what can only be described as a deeply unhealthy relationship with the handmaiden Ankhsunamun (the wife of Tutankhamun, who died several decades before Seti was born). In The Mummy Returns (2001), Seti is also revealed as the father of Princess Nefertiti. As the author, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman famously noted: ‘In Hollywood, no one knows anything.’
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A final character deserves to be mentioned as the story of Seti draws to a close. Her name was Dorothy Louise Eady, although she will be remembered by Egyptologists as Omm Sety.¹¹ Born in 1904 in London, the young Dorothy suffered a serious head trauma as a child, developing the exceedingly rare foreign accent syndrome. Alongside her new accent, the young girl began to develop uncharacteristic behaviour. She became obsessed with ancient Egyptian religion, an obsession which resulted in her expulsion from school as she began to compare Egyptian mythology favourably to Christianity and refused to sing Christian hymns. When taken to visit the British Museum, the young girl became ecstatic, claiming in front of her bemused parents that she was now home, while pointing to a picture of Seti’s temple at Abydos. She kissed the feet of the royal statues in the collection, and her vivid interest and vivacious personality soon drew the attention of the museum’s curator, the eminent Egyptologist Sir Ernst Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, who advised her to study hieroglyphs in order for her to properly understand the ancient Egyptian culture.
As a teenager she said she began to receive visitations from Seti I during the night. When she described these experiences, she was temporarily incarcerated behind the walls of a sanatorium. When she reached adulthood, the determined young woman moved to London, where she worked for an Egyptian magazine. There she met Egyptian student Eman Abdel Meguid, and in 1931 she travelled to Egypt to marry him. Upon arriving in Egypt, Dorothy’s strange visitations and experiences increased, as did an inexplicable ability to charm snakes. Aside from Seti, she claimed to have received nightly visitations by a ghost named Hor-Ra, who told her the story of her previous life, which, in her mind, readily explained the curious affinity for and connection to Egypt she had felt from such an early age. She said that according to Hor-Ra, she had been a priestess named Bentreshyt in a previous life. Bentreshyt had been brought up in the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, and had been consecrated to the temple as a virgin. However, one day she had met the young King Seti and become his lover. When their affair was discovered, she was threatened with public exposure and execution. Unable to face the humiliation it would cause her family and the king, Bentreshyt took her own life.
During the 1940s and 1950s, after separating from her husband – with whom she had a son called Sety – Dorothy worked with archaeologists Selim Hasan and Ahmed Fakhry on excavations of pyramids in the vicinity of Cairo. She became known as an excellent draughtswoman and artist, and also helped to edit and proof-read the publications of her supervisors. At this stage in her life she took up the name Omm Sety, meaning ‘mother of Sety’. In 1956, she moved to Abydos and worked as a draughtswoman in the very temple where she believed Bentreshyt had lived and died. From the moment she arrived, she displayed an uncanny knowledge of the area’s layout and the various decorations found throughout the temple. She worked in one of the rooms of the temple and often brought food offerings and prayed to the gods. Her occasionally outlandish ways caused some comment in the local community, especially her decision to keep a cobra as a pet in her outdoor office. She was faced with retirement in 1964, but the Egyptian antiquities service made an exception to their rules and she was allowed to continue work.
When Dorothy Eady died in 1981, her final resting place became a source of some controversy. Because both Coptic Christians and local Muslims considered her a pagan, they refused to allow her to be buried in their cemeteries. Foreseeing this eventuality, she had built an underground tomb for herself near her home. But upon her death, the local authorities changed their minds, refusing to allow her body to rest in it. Instead, she was buried in the desert, just outside the boundaries of a Coptic cemetery.