Abydos Tours & Tickets

Abydos is a long way from anywhere a cruise goes, roughly 160 kilometres north of Luxor, and the drive is the reason most visitors to Egypt never see the best-carved walls in the country. The temple of Seti I holds relief carving of a quality that makes the rest of Egypt look approximate: figures modelled in shallow raised relief with real anatomy under the linen, faces with expression in them, and in many chambers the original paint still sitting on the stone.

For the ancient Egyptians, Abydos mattered more than almost anywhere. It was the cult centre of Osiris, god of the dead and of resurrection, and the place where his head was believed to be buried. Pilgrims came here for two thousand years, many leaving small offering chapels so that some part of them would remain near the god. Being buried at Abydos, or failing that having a stela set up here, was a thing Egyptians of every period wanted.

The carving, which is the reason to come

Seti I built the temple in the thirteenth century BC and his son Ramesses II finished it, and you can see the join. Seti's craftsmen worked in raised relief, cutting away the background so the figures stand proud of the wall, which is slow, expensive and beautiful. Ramesses switched much of the later work to sunk relief, which is faster and cheaper and, in the same building, visibly coarser. Walking from one section to the other is the clearest lesson in Egyptian craftsmanship available anywhere.

The temple has seven sanctuaries side by side, one each for Osiris, Isis, Horus, Amun-Ra, Ra-Horakhty, Ptah and the deified Seti himself. Most Egyptian temples run on a single axis to a single sanctuary. This one runs seven in parallel, which gives the building an unusual breadth and means you keep finding another painted room.

The King List

On a wall of one corridor is the Abydos King List: seventy-six cartouches naming the rulers of Egypt from Menes down to Seti himself, carved as Seti and the young Ramesses make offerings to their predecessors.

It is one of the most important chronological documents to survive from the ancient world, and it is important partly for who is missing. Hatshepsut is not there. Neither is Akhenaten, nor Tutankhamun, nor Ay. These were rulers the nineteenth dynasty had decided were illegitimate, so they were written out. The list is not a record. It is an argument about who counts, carved in stone by the people who won.

The Osireion

Behind the temple, reached down a sloping passage, is a structure that does not look Egyptian in the usual sense at all: a sunken hall of massive undecorated granite piers, standing in groundwater, with a central island. It is the Osireion, a symbolic tomb of Osiris built by Seti and long assumed to be far older because the megalithic style is so unlike the temple above it.

It is usually partly flooded, which is deliberate: the island represents the primeval mound rising from the waters of creation. It is also, practically, why access varies. Water levels change, so whether you can go down depends on the day.

The helicopter on the ceiling

One of the temple's lintels has become famous online as an ancient carving of a helicopter, a submarine and an aircraft. Standing under it, you can see why people say it.

The explanation is a palimpsest. Seti's titles were carved, then partly filled with plaster and recarved with Ramesses II's titles on top. The plaster has fallen out over three thousand years, leaving the two sets of hieroglyphs overlapping, and the overlap happens to produce shapes a modern eye reads as machines. It is a genuinely good example of how accidental the effect is: nothing in the surrounding text supports the reading, and the same recarving appears elsewhere in the temple without producing anything that looks like a vehicle.

Look at it anyway. It is a better story once you know what it actually is.

Getting there

Abydos is near the modern town of El Balyana. From Luxor it is a half-day drive each way and is almost always combined with Dendera in a single long day, since Dendera sits roughly halfway back. Expect to leave early and return in the afternoon. Some longer Nile cruises of twelve nights and more include both; the standard three, four and seven-night Luxor to Aswan itineraries do not come this far north.

Allow ninety minutes at the temple, plus the Osireion if water allows.

Is it worth the day?

If you care about how things were made, yes, without qualification. The carving in Seti's chapels is the finest surviving work of its kind and nothing at Karnak or Luxor approaches it for delicacy.

If you are on a first visit with four days in Egypt, no. It is a full day for one temple, and that day competes with the Valley of the Kings. Abydos is a second-visit site, and people who go back to Egypt tend to put it first.