Egypt Exploration Society
Abydos Author(s): Edouard Naville Source: The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1914), pp. 2-8 Published by: Egypt Exploration Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3853664 Accessed: 01/08/2009 13:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ees. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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ABYDOS THE name of Abydos is a good example of what we call popular etymology. Its Egyptian form is Abut or Abtu, which sounds like the name of the city of Abydos on the Hellespont, a most familiar name to the Greeks. Finding an Egyptian word which had some likeness to the name they knew, the Greeks mixed the two together, as is often the case in our time. Abydos was a large city. Its foundation must go back to the earliest time of Egyptian history, but it never was very powerful in a political sense. In this respect it could never be compared with Thebes or Memphis. Its importance was chiefly religious; just as On, Heliopolis, was the city and residence of Turn Harmakhis, Abydos was that of Osiris. This god is constantly called " he who resides at Abydos," and since he is as often styled "the god of the West," Abydos has become the symbol of the West, just as the city of Dad, Busiris, is that of the East. Abydos is the residence of Osiris. This god is by far the most interesting of Egyptian gods. He is the only one who has a kind of moral character, while all the others are forces of nature or natural phenomena. He is the god of the dead, a funerary divinity, before whom takes place the most solemn scene found in the Book of the Dead, the judgment. At Abydos is supposed to be the hall, or rather the court of law, where this scene takes place. The god, in the form of a man, is sitting on a throne under a canopy and before him are his four assessors, the gods of the four cardinal points, and the balance in which the heart of the deceased is weighed while the dead man appeals to forty-two divinities and takes them as witnesses that he has not committed any of the forty-two capital sins. We must consider that this scene takes place in a celestial Abydos. Just as each man has a Ka, a double, exactly similar to what he has been on earth, somnething like his shadow, who lives in the other world, so it is with some of the religious cities. They have in the other world a double, a repetition, a kind of projection exactly similar to what they are in this world. This is particularly striking in the case of Heliopolis, Abydos and Busiris, for they all have their places in the celestial geography. Heliopolis sometimes reminds one of the celestial Jerusalem. Another place near Abydos which occurs constantly in the funereal texts is Roset, the entrance to the lower world, a kind of opening through which the deceased have to pass. It may be one of the clefts one sees in the mountains closing the horizon on the West, which are the beginning of the desert. Osiris is a god having a human appearance. He is generally seen holding in his hands the hook and the flail, the emblems of royal power. His consort is Isis and his son Horus. Is this human form the original appearance of the god, and is Osiris
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his original name? These are questions very much discussed. Various authors advocate the idea that this form of Osiris and the well-known myth of his destruction by Set, who dismembered his body, as well as the restoration of his body by his son Horus, come from the Delta in the North. I shall not now discuss this matter. One thing seems certain, that the usual and well-known form of Osiris, the king in man's form, is comparatively late and is not that found under the first dynasties, at least at Abydos. Abydos had from the first been a city, the raison d'etre of which was religious. It was connected with the beginning of Egyptian history. We know from Manetho, the Egyptian priest who compiled in Greek the annals of the kings, that the first historical king, Mena, left a place called This, in Middle Egypt, went down the river and stopped at the head of the Delta, where he founded Memphis, and where he made great hydraulic works, diverting the bed of the Nile so that the river should flow more to the east, in order to leave an open space on which to build his new capital Memphis. This is in the neighbourhood of Abydos. It has been identified as a hill not very from far Girgeh, and called el Birbeh, the temple. The name of This is found in the New Empire. The chief or prince of This, or the royal son of This, was an official having a high administrative employment, but though This was perhaps originally the civil and political capital of the province it was soon superseded by the religious city of Abydos. Evidently the information given by Manetho is correct on this point: the origin of the dynastic series of kings of Egypt is derived from Abydos. There, and in the immediate neighbourhood, we find the oldest Egyptian constructions, the remains of the first three dynasties. There the kings showed that they kept up their connection with This by building their funerary monuments. About a mile from the cultivated land, at a short distance from the mountains, is a mound called by the natives Umm el Ga'ab, the mnotherof pots, because of the quantity of pottery with which it is covered and which gives it its red colour. There the excavations, first of a Frenchman, M. Am6lineau, and afterwards of Prof. Flinders Petrie, have revealed extensive constructions in bricks, which have been called tombs. They generally consist of a central chamber, on the sides of which are suites of rooms, where have been found vases, furniture, slate palettes, flint instruments and all the objects which have revealed to us what the civilisation of the first dynasties had been. There were also big jars on the caps of which were sealings printed with what has been supposed to be cylinders, but I should rather think with small engraved rectangular pieces of wood. I need not revert to the importance of the discovery of the names of the kings of the first three dynasties, not the name each bore as a living ruler, but that of his Ka, his double, who is living in the other world, while his body is hidden in the earth. The monuments at Umm el Ga'ab are called tombs. I do not consider that they were actual burial places, at least not for the kings. I believe we have here the first example of what we see throughout the whole of Egyptian history. The place where the king is worshipped is distinct from the tomb itself. The room or the hall where he is worshipped is accessible to the friends and families and to the priests of the deceased; the body is concealed in a closed chamber. When the place of worship was enlarged and became a whole temple, as we find in the case of the temple of Deir el
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Bahari or the Ramesseum, it soon was used as a cemetery where the subjects of the king, officials, priests and perhaps his servants, were buried. It is the same at Umm el Ga'ab, where the rooms around the central chamber have been used as the burial places of a great number of officials and priests, probably what we may call the court of the time, and even the dwarfs. The idea which led to this custom is twofold. The deceased wished to be as near as possible to their former ruler, and also it was a kind of homage paid to the deceased king. The Kas, the doubles of his officials and priests, were to surround his own in the other world. They were his society, for the deceased king did not like to be alone. It seems to me probable that the chief reason which induced the kings of the first three dynasties to have their Ka sanctuaries at Abydos was the existence there of the sanctuary of their god, who was called afterwards Osiris. Osiris does not appear with this name in the earliest inscriptions, for in these he is called Apuatu or Upuatu, the opener of ways, the guide. He generally has the appearance of an animal of the canine species, it may be a jackal, a dog, a wolf or a fox, and as such he is represented on the standard of the kings who follow himn in their imarch towards the North. Though the name of the god changed, the animals were still sacred in the place. We have discovered there a necropolis containing thousands of mummies of these animals. It may reasonably be supposed that there was a sanctuary of Apuatu somewhere near the present temple of Osiris. His Ka was worshipped tliere, just as the Ka of Osiris was the divinity to whom Seti I afterwards raised a temple. When the ancient authors speak of the tomb of Osiris, I believe this must be interpreted as being the sanctuary of the Ka, the funereal temple, just as when they speak of the tomb of Osymandyas, the same word as Usimares Rameses II, they mean the Ramesseum, where the king was certainly not buried, since his tomb is in the valley of the kings, and his mummy, which was recovered, never was in the temple. When they speak of the head only of Osiris being buried at Abydos, I suppose it means that with the Ka, with his statue or his emblem, was deposited the amulet of the stone head, a certain number of which have been discovered in the tombs, and which was said to ensure the safety of the whole body. The founder of the great temple of Osiris was Seti I, the second king of the 19th dynasty, the father of Rameses II. It consisted at first of two open courts, giving access to a columned hall of three rows of twelve columns. From this open seven vaulted rooms, each dedicated to a special divinity, the three northern ones being those of Osiris, Isis and Horus. From the room of Osiris a passage leads into a part of the temple, specially dedicated to him also, consisting of a middle hall with ten columns and side rooms. A wing of the temple contains the famous list of kings, from Mena to Seti I. The sculptures of these rooms, some of which, having brilliant colours, are very well preserved, are among the finest in Egypt and are remarkable pieces of art. In front of his father's hall Rameses II built another, which, like all his work, is done hastily and without much care. It cannnot compare with that of Seti I. These halls and rooms are for the ceremonies of the worship of Osiris and of the divinities he admitted in his temrple and for each of whom a special room was butilt. But we may ask where was the chamber dedicated to the Ka, to the double ? Where was he supposed to reside?
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In my opinion, it must be under the sanctuary of Osiris, at a certain depth in the earth. What makes me think it must be so, is what we found in the temple of the 11th dynasty at Deir el Bahari, the temple of Mentuhotep (Egypt Exploration Fund Memoirs, No. xxx, Deir el Bahari, xith Dyn., Part II). This temple ends with a sanctuary, in front of which stood a hypostyle hall where the bases of the columns only remain. In the middle of the court, before the hypostyle hall, opens a sloping passage disappearing very soon in the rock. It was choked at the entrance with large stones. When we had removed them, we found ourselves at the door of a rock cut corridor sloping down. It was empty, and onle could walk upright through its whole length. At a distance ot about 150 feet from the entrance, it begins to be vaulted. It ends in a small granite chamnber,extremely well built, made of large blocks of well polished syenite. The greater part of it is occupied by a shrine made of blocks of alabaster of the finest quality without any inscription or oru,ament except a thick moulding. It certainly had a door since the holes in which the pivots turned are still visible. In front of it were boats with figures, fragments of wooden weapons, cloth and remains of offerings. I believe it cannot be called a tomb. It is not a burial place for it did not contain a coffin. Its dimensions are too small to contain a stone sarcophagus as it would have done had it been that of a king. Besides, a coffin is never found in a shrine. Wherever we see in the sculptures a shrine being opened, it invariably contains an emblem or a statue, and I have no doubt that it was so at Deir el Bahari. A shrine contained the statue of the king, the figure of his Ka, and the priests could go down and take him offerings which would be described on a large stele, while a chamber containing a mummy would have been hermetically closed. Judging from analogy, I suppose that the Ka of Osiris must have been worshipped at Abydos in a subterranean chapel, at a certain depth under the sanctuary of the god. We know already the entrance and part of the construction leading to it. It is what is called the Osireion, which we began excavating, and which we have to finish next winter. Our aim is to reach the room where the Ka of Osiris was supposed to dwell, his subterranean sanctuary. For the knowledge of the existence of a passage going probably towards the temple, we are indebted to Prof. Flinders Petrie, or rather to Miss Murray his assistant, who was the first to attempt an excavation behind the temple of Seti, at some distance in the sacred enclosure, the temenos. There a depression running parallel to the enclosure on the west side showed the presence of some old work, and in fact Prof. Petrie discovered a subterranean passage covered with texts and figures from the Book of the Dead and bearing the name of King Menephtah, the son of RamtnesesII. This passage, which does not go towards the temple, ends in a small chamber, also ornamented with funerary figures and texts. Just in front of the chamber, a doorway with a lintel indicates the entrance into a passage. Miss Murray stopped there, after having copied the texts which were in the depth of the doorway, and covered it up again. This passage in the direction of the temple, the door of which had only been seen, was the object which attracted us to that spot. Was it going as far as the temple and what should we find at the end ? These various questions encouraged us to attack the enormous mounds of rubbish which were before us, and which turned out to be even a larger work than we expected. For we had to face, not only the
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removal of tons of sand which centuries had accumulated on these old buildings, but also close to the temple were heaps or rather mounds of rubbish which came from Mariette's excavations, when he cleared the temple of Seti I. In fact, one winter's work has left us only at the beginning of the task, but has revealed enough to show how important it is to bring that excavation to a finish, and, in order to do that, to work on a larger scale than we did before. In speaking of excavations it is most dangerous to be a prophet. I should like only to explain briefly the reasons which allow us to hope that the work is really worth the money and labour. It is an excavation of a monument and not that of a cemetery where one may expect to find objects for a museum; it is the clearing of a construction which at present seems unique. The purpose of such excavations is the solution of important questions concerning history, art, or religion. The Fund was the first to initiate this kind of work at Deir el Bahari, where we discovered a temple absolutely unknown. The example has been followed by the Germans in the Sieglin expedition, which devoted itself to the Second Pyramid of Gizeh. No objects were found in that extensive and costly work, but we know much better now what the pyramids were, and the assemblage of constructions of which they were a part. In the pyramid itself was the funereal chamber and mummy, on the east side a large and somewhat complicated temple, from which a causeway led to the larger one. In this case, it was the so-called Temple of the Sphinx, the real nature of which has been recognized and fixed. Are these not most valuable results ? We are in a similar position at Abydos. There stands a temple dedicated to Osiris, which has a decided funereal character. We know from the Greek authors that it was called the tomb of Osiris, which was said to contain not the body of the god but his head. Just as on the western side of Thebes, the neighbourhood of this temple is a vast cemetery where thousands of tombs have been discovered. One of the mounds, Kom-es-sultan, is quite honeycombed with tombs of .the 12th and 13th dynasties. What is it that gave the temple of Abydos its funerary character? There must be something else than the big constructions above ground. In the case of a human king there mnight be in connection with it a tomb hidden in some remote valley. But the Egyptians could not pretend to have the body of the god, so it is likely that there is a sanctuary for the Ka of the god. There is the interest of the question raised; it has a religious bearing. What kind of construction did the Egyptians erect to a god whom they supposed to have died? I must say that what we have already found is very encouraging. After having cleared again the door discovered( by Miss Murray, we pushed forward into the passage which was quite concealed and filled with rubbish. It slopes gently downwards, then becomes horizontal again, the length being about 45 feet. On the walls are texts of the Book of the Dead; on the right the 1st and 17th chapter, on the left the 99th, the 146th, and the negative confession. The way the texts are arranged shows that they have been sculptured later and not at the time of the building. The beginning, the first chapter, is at the end of the passage; on the right the texts are read going up, the vignettes on the top of the text are also in the same order. Arriving at the entrance, the reader has to go over to the left sid(leand has to read the texts going down. If this construction were really a tomb, as those of the kings
Plate II, p. 7
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. I
Fig. i.
Scenes and inscriptions
Fig. 2.
on the walls of the Osireion
Coptic lamp of bronze from Abydos
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at Thebes, the text would begin at the entrance. Therefore we must consider all these texts as an usurpation of Menephtah, who merely began placing them there, or did it hastily, since in the following rooms the funerary texts are only painted, and now hardly legible. They are not outlined for sculpture as in the tombs of the kings but are painted. I believe Menephtah was actuated by the same feeling as the men who had their burials in the Ramesseum or at Deir el Bahari. It was his wish to be as near as possible to Osiris, to be in his abode. In all these representations we must always remember that the reason why they are made is not mere ornamentation, it is what is called magical imitation, or rather imitative magic. The fact of something being painted or sculptured is sufficient to cause it to come into existence, to live in the other world. The passage had a ceiling of monolithic architraves, which have all disappeared except the first. When we reached the end of the passage, on both sides we found wide openings which evidently were chambers, and in front a huge monolithic lintel 15 feet long. It looked at first like an entrance to another passage, but we soon perceived that it was merely an opening in a stone wall about 12 feet thick, built of enormous blocks of sandstone and red quartzite. This wall separates the two rooms we had first reached from other rooms in the direction of the temple. We could clear only the southern room. The west wall leans against a mound of marl and is thinner. The southern one has outside a kind of rough casing in limestone and I believe it was not subterranean at that place. The erection was roofed over with large stones which have been used since as building material. Over the roof was probably sand, so that the whole construction looked like a huge mastaba. The wall on the east side of the chamber is built of enormous stones very well joined. It reminds one of the masonry of the time of the pyramids, of the so-called Temple of the Sphinx. It seems probable that it is much older than the temple of Seti. It may have been part of the first sanctuary, for there was certainly one at an early date, at least of the time of the 12th dynasty. Otherwise one would not understand why there was such a large cemetery of that epoch, and of the following dynasty, such as is found in the hill called Kom-es-sultan, where Mariette made such productive excavations. Beyond this wall, going towards the temple, we could trace two more rooms, so that what we are now excavating is not a mere passage, it is a series of rooms, the last of which is probably under the temple of Seti. This is one of the questions raised by this unique construction. Are we here in the oldest sanctuary of Osiris ? For we cannot suppose that there was none at the time when the kings of the first dynasties built their funereal monuments at Umm el Ga'ab. There must have been a settlement of some importance in a place which already, at that early time, had a sacred character. This character would naturally be derived from the existence of a sanctuary, from its being the abode of a most venerated divinity. Abydos has always been the city of Osiris, as Heliopolis was the city of Tum. When did Abydos begin to be the residence of the god ? When was the first place of worship erected there, and when did Osiris take that name instead of Apuatu ? I am going to risk an opinion which, I confess, is at present only a conjecture. The name of Osiris means "he who makes a seat or an abode," and Apuatu, as we have
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seen, is "the opener of ways," the guide whom the conquerors follow. Did the change of name not take place when an abode, a sanctuary, was first built at Abydos, and he ceased to be the wandering god, the standard of a tribe of migrating conquerors? If this hypothesis were confirmed, it would explain also why Abydos was the first capital of the early kings, and the starting point of Menes. Perhaps the excavations of next winter will throw some light on these points, but we must not be too hopeful, and especially we must not venture on any prophecy. The work next winter will be on a larger scale than before. As you know, the clearing is done with railway plant, lent to us very kindly by the Service des Antiquit6s. We shall require, and probably shall have to purchase, more cars. The plan is to have two parallel lines working, one on either side. The amount of rubbish to be carried away is enormous. Last year we did not touch the northern chamber at the end of the passage, because it lay under something like 30 feet of rubbish which our northern line will have to remove. Further, towards the temple, we are in loose sand constantly falling in again, a most unpleasant addition to our labour. When we stopped at the end of the winter of 1912, we had reached the foot of the high mound resulting from Mariette's excavations. When this famous explorer cleared the back rooms of the temple of Seti, he had in view only the construction itself. Besides, the time had not yet come when work of that kind was done with a railway. The rubbish was carried away only with baskets. One may fancy the numnberof boys required for clearing large halls like those of such a large temple. It was necessary to throw the rubbish as nrearas possible, just behind the wall of the temple. The sight of this mound was certainly very discouraging. Next month when we resume work, we shall find that it is gone. Sir Gaston Maspero had for several years intended to complete the work of Mariette, and to clear the access to the temple of Seti I. The native houses in front of the entrance court were to be pulled down, and the ground excavated in order to show the avenue leaditng to that court. At the same time, it was necessary to carry off part of Mariette's mound which was close to the wall of the temple and rose above its height. Sir Gaston told us that since he was obliged to attack this mound he might as well have the whole removed, and thus greatly facilitate our work, if the Fund were disposed to bear part of the cost. An arrangement was made with Sir Gaston, the Fund contributed £200 towards the expense, and the whole part of the mound which was in front of us has been carried away under the direction of the Inspector, M. Lefebvre. Thus we shall have to carry on only proper excavation, and we have to express our thanks to Sir Gaston and his agent, to whose kindness and work we owe it that the huge mound has been removed at a relatively small cost, and thus we have been saved a considerable amount of labour and time. We may expect now that, with a sufficient number of men, and with a little more plant, we shall be able this winter to finish the Osireion, unless something unexpected turns up, which may always happen. I earnestly hope that we shall have no reason to regret the expense and the labour, and I shall be very happy if you realize in some degree the importance and the interest of the questions to be solved by the excavation of the Osireion. EDOUARD
NAVILLE.
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. I
Plate I, lFrontispiece
Entrance to inner chamber of the Osireion, discovered
I9gi
