To this dynasty
belong the most beautiful monuments even visible in
Abydos, that
it is those
constructed by Sety I, the temple of Ramesses II and the inscriptions of
the Osireion that we owe to Merenptah, son of Ramesses
II.
Sety I made there
build several temples: a chapel in honor of his father, Ramesses
I, his beautiful temple and the Osireion. In a stele dedicated to his father placed in the chapel, Sety makes a touching picture of the family solidarity around Ramesses I (Vandersleyen,1995). On present time, the rests of this chapel are at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (see below the navigation bar).
In this
site, an important part is dedicated to the temple of Sety I. This temple owes its relative good present
state probably to the fact
that it was in part sanded and therefore irretrievable. The first mention of this temple must be carried to the assets of the Father Sicard
in 1718 (Sauneron, Bifao65) that
makes a description of it and indicate that
the rooms are sanded up. In 1731,
they are always
sanded up. In his work, Mariette indicates that 10
years before his arrival, the temple
was again under the sands. He is disappointed besides by
the inscriptions of the temple, finding them
repetitive and less
interesting than those of the Greco-Roman temples of Egypt. I duplicate a part of the plate 33 of the Ist volume of Mariette where he drew the walls of
the chapel of Sety. While comparing with
the present state that you can see while clicking here, one can see that the inscriptions deteriorated since that time.
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