The British Isles have always been rich in eccentrics - as well as outright crooks. This strange Englishwoman could not be attributed to any of these categories. Born on January 16, 1904, Egyptologist Dorothy Idi, also known by her Arabic name Umm Seti, has lived an amazing - albeit very calm and measured - life. And, as she assured, the second.
The land of the pharaohs
Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century attracted tourists no less than today - except that in those years they were striving there not for the sun and sea, but for the sake of fashionable oriental exoticism. However, the pyramids, the sphinx, and in general everything connected with the ancient civilization of the country, was, of course, popular even then - especially after the discovery by Carter and Carnarvon in 1922 of the fabulous riches of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. In addition to the idle curious pharaohs, adventurers of all stripes also hurried to the country - in this respect, "The Mummy" and "Seekers of the Lost Ark" are not at all as fantastic as they might seem. The famous occultist Aleister Crowley appeared in Cairo back in 1904, where (if, of course, you believe the Master Therion himself) communicated with a "higher mind" named Aivaz, who dictated the "Book of the Law" to him. The French traditionalist philosopher Rene Guénon settled in the Egyptian capital in the early 1930s and, until his death, broadcast his esoteric revelations from there to his followers. But a young Englishwoman named Dorothy Idi went to Cairo in 1933 not for ancient wisdom, not in search of treasures, and not even for the "magic of the East." She hurried to the groom - however, it was rather a second. Firstly, she was returning home. Although I have never been to North Africa before - at least in this life. Although I have never been to North Africa before - at least in this life. Although I have never been to North Africa before - at least in this life.
Dorothy Idi, also known by her Arabic name Umm Seti, was born in 1904 in London to a family of an overriding tailor who later became a successful businessman in the entertainment industry and owner of several cinemas in the south of England. The girl obviously faced the usual happy life of a representative of the British middle class - but at the age of three, little Dorothy unsuccessfully fell down the stairs in her parents' house and lost consciousness for several hours. The urgently invited doctor could not do anything and was about to call the coroner to pronounce death when Dorothy suddenly regained consciousness. The worst did not happen, but the amazed parents stopped recognizing their daughter - the girl often cried, woke up at night and asked to "take her home." When asked where her home was, Dorothy replied that she did not knowbut there are gardens and a large building with white columns - and again she cried. However, she quickly learned to read and showed a noticeable ability for languages. At the age of five she was presented with Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia, and in one of a dozen volumes with red covers, she suddenly saw the same place - in an article on Ancient Egypt, with a color picture of a temple in Abydos. “This is home! Dorothy exclaimed. "But where are the gardens?" Soon, her parents took her to the British Museum for the first time, and there, in the halls of Egyptian antiquities, she was again covered with out of nowhere memories (or, in the opinion of others, fantasies): Dorothy ran between the statues, kissed them and called her people.and in one of a dozen volumes with red covers, she suddenly saw that very place - in an article on Ancient Egypt, with a color picture of a temple in Abydos. “This is home! Dorothy exclaimed. "But where are the gardens?" Soon her parents took her to the British Museum for the first time, and there, in the halls of Egyptian antiquities, she was again covered with out of nowhere memories (or, in the opinion of others, fantasies): Dorothy ran between the statues, kissed them and called her people.and in one of a dozen volumes with red covers, she suddenly saw that very place - in an article on Ancient Egypt, with a color picture of a temple in Abydos. “This is home! Dorothy exclaimed. "But where are the gardens?" Soon, her parents took her to the British Museum for the first time, and there, in the halls of Egyptian antiquities, she was again covered with out of nowhere memories (or, in the opinion of others, fantasies): Dorothy ran between the statues, kissed them and called her people. Dorothy ran between the statues, kissed them and called them her people. Dorothy ran between the statues, kissed them and called them her people.
Eternal love
The British Museum became almost a home for her: at the age of 10, a strange girl was noticed by the curator of the Egyptian collection, the famous archaeologist and orientalist Wallis Budge, and took up her education. Manic love for Egypt, however, led to expulsion from the school: Dorothy refused to sing the Anglican hymn, which cursed the "wicked Egyptians." By the age of 12, Dorothy was already quite decently disassembling hieroglyphs and knew the history of Ancient Egypt quite well. But at the age of 15, something happened, again from the category of the supernatural: in a dream the girl appeared the pharaoh Seti I, who lived in the XIII century BC. father of Ramses II the Great, and announced to her that Dorothy was the reincarnation of a priestess of the temple in Abydos named Bentreshit ("harp of joy"), the king's beloved. During the year, Dorothy learned in dreams the story of her previous life: Bentreshit was the daughter of a soldier and a vegetable trader,after her mother's death, she was sent to the temple in Abydos. At the age of 14, she took priestly vows and participated in the mysteries of Osiris. One day Seti I met her and they became lovers. But when Bentreshit became pregnant, she had to tell the high priest the name of her lover. Learning that death would most likely be her punishment, the priestess laid hands on herself in order to protect the name of the king from shame. As puberty progressed, the visions became menacingly erotic: in Dorothy's dreams, Seti tore off her shirt, lay down next to her. Concerned parents sent her to a psychiatric hospital, but to no avail: a completely normal girl in ordinary life nevertheless continued to consider herself the embodiment of the ancient Egyptian priestess of the goddess Isis. Dorothy subconsciously longed for one thing - to return to Abydos, the place where she had once been happy.
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Goddess Isis. Painted relief from the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings. XIX dynasty.
The family had by that time moved to Portsmouth, where Dorothy worked as a singer, performing before screenings in one of her father's cinemas (later in Cairo, neighbors nicknamed her "Bulbul", "Nightingale", for her clear voice and love of singing). At the same time, she continued to study the history of Egypt and collect artifacts brought from the Nile (those that were within her pocket). At the age of 27, Idi moved to London and got a job as an illustrator for a magazine that fought for the complete independence of Egypt. There she met an Egyptian student named Imam Abdel Megid. Soon Dorothy moved to Megid's homeland, where she married him. She named her son, who was born in Cairo, after her long-dead lover - Seti.
The couple divorced three years later - Abdel grew a little tired of his wife's incessant visions (and her chronic inability to cook). He got a job in Iraq and left, while Dorothy lived for a while with her little son in a tent at the foot of the Cheops pyramid, and then found accommodation in the village of Nazlet es-Samman, near the Sphinx. A strange Englishwoman (by that time already fluent in Arabic) shocked her neighbors: she either spent the night inside the Great Pyramid, then climbed to its top and performed some complex ancient rituals there. All this in the end was worth the custody of his son. Having received, not without the support of his English grandmother and grandfather, the education of an engineer, Seti Megid subsequently settled safely in Kuwait. In the early 1970s, he tried to convince his mother to move in with him (and her eight grandchildren), but was flatly refused:"Here I have lived for a quarter of a century, and here I will die." We are, however, getting ahead of ourselves …
Way back home
Dorothy managed to get to Abydos only after two decades of life in Egypt. All this time, she collected bit by bit information about the ancient rituals of Osiris, prayed and studied the life of modern Egyptians. And she worked as a translator and draftsman of the Department of Antiquities. First with the father of Egyptian national archeology Selim Hassan; after his death - with his student Ahmed Fakhri (in his main work, the 10-volume "Excavation at Giza", he mentions, among others, in the dedication "Dorothy Go, with special gratitude"). But in 1956, the excavation was completed, and Fakhri offered a choice of either a decently paid job in the Cairo office, or a draftsman position at the sluggish excavation in Abydos, paying $ 2 a day. Needless to say, Dorothy chose the second option.
Temple of Setos in Abydos, Egypt.
On March 3, 1956, Dorothy Idee finally embarked on a major journey of her life. She was 52 years old, and, probably, she already knew that she would not have to go anywhere else - since then she has left Abydos only once, for one day in Cairo. In Abydos, using the money she had accumulated during her work in Giza, she bought a small house and a donkey: the rest - a kerosene stove, a kettle and a small receiver - she already had. It was there that they began to call her, according to the Arabic tradition, Umm Seti - "the mother of Seti". She took up the painstaking work of copying, cataloging and translating the inscriptions of the half-buried temple of Osiris, begun by Seti I and completed under his son Ramses II. The fellahi neighbors treated her with respect, although they were a little afraid, considering her a great sorceress - however,the surrounding women willingly turned to her with a request to offer a prayer to the ancient gods for deliverance from infertility. Umm Seti didn't refuse anyone. She did not refuse help, of course, to the archaeologists who came to Abydos with excavations - and here, by the way, the strangest incident in the life of Umm Seti, but recorded by impartial witnesses, happened. She accurately pointed out the place where the remains of the very gardens that she had dreamed of since childhood were hidden under the layer of sand - and she was not mistaken. In the temple itself, where she went twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, Umm Seti found her bearings even without a flashlight - “what's surprising, because once I spent my whole life here”,but recorded by impartial witnesses, an incident in the life of Umm Seti. She accurately pointed out the place where the remains of the very gardens that she had dreamed of since childhood were hidden under the layer of sand - and she was not mistaken. In the temple itself, where she went twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, Umm Seti found her bearings even without a flashlight - “what's surprising, because once I spent my whole life here”,but recorded by impartial witnesses, an incident in the life of Umm Seti. She accurately pointed out the place where the remains of the very gardens that she had dreamed of since childhood were hidden under the layer of sand - and she was not mistaken. In the temple itself, where she went twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, Umm Seti found her bearings even without a flashlight - “what's surprising, because once I spent my whole life here”,
In 1969, Umm Seti was retired, and she spent her days in Abydos - in the company of numerous cats (she always loved animals) and the pharaoh who continued to pay her nightly visits. She methodically wrote down the dating reports in a diary, which has not yet been published; according to the testimony of the British Egyptologist and writer Toby Wilkinson, who got acquainted with him, "you cannot call him modest." She impeccably observed the morning and evening rituals of prayers to Osiris and Isis, and during the day she took tourists around the temple, telling them the history of the ancient capital of the pharaohs, mentioning Seti I and Ramses II as contemporaries - however, in a sense, this was indeed so. It is worth noting that the "Abydos hieroglyphs" that became popular at the end of the twentieth century, in which fans of "secret knowledge" find images of a helicopter, a submarine and other modern technology,were not in the eyes of Umm Seti something strange or unusual - like other serious Egyptologists, she saw on the tablets from "her" temple only the orderly dilapidated inscriptions with the names of the pharaohs.
Abydos hieroglyphs - hieroglyphs found in the temple of Osiris in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos and mistaken for a helicopter, submarine, airship and glider.
Grave by the side of the road
What really happened to Dorothy Goe remains a mystery. A number of researchers believe that when falling down stairs as a child, the future Umm Seti damaged the so-called locus coeruleus, a region in the upper-lateral part of the rhomboid fossa of the brain stem responsible, among other things, for sleep / wake patterns and responses to stress and panic. This led to the fact that Idi actually existed in two realities - true and fictional, and in both states she led a functional life. The choice of the "second reality" was, perhaps, completely accidental - although it remains unclear why it was the picture of the temple in Abydos that attracted the girl's attention (and how she knew about the temple gardens, the existence of which was unknown to archaeologists). The appearance in the history of Seti I is more understandable: before the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun,he was the most popular Egyptian pharaoh among the public. The well-preserved mummy of Seti was found at the end of the 19th century, and photographs (aquiline nose, sensual lips - the ideal image of a movie star from the 1910s – 1920s) were widely circulated in popular publications.
As the people who knew Umm Seti emphasized, she did not try to convert the interlocutors to "her faith" and calmly perceived distrust. In addition, she really knew a lot about Ancient Egypt, as evidenced by the respectful attitude towards her on the part of the world's leading Egyptologists. James Allen, President of the International Association of Egyptologists, who called Umm Seti the patron saint of the profession [of the Egyptologist], spoke of her like this: “Sometimes it felt like Umm Seti was playing a trick on you. She was absolutely definitely not a fraud - but she knew that many looked at her as if she were crazy, to which, however, she was accustomed and did not pay attention to it … She believed so strongly that sometimes it became creepy - and you yourself began to doubt in your own sense of reality. " John Albert Wilson, Elder of American Egyptology,called Umm Seti a responsible scientist and noted the importance and accuracy of her ethnographic studies of the customs of the contemporary rural population of Egypt - and how they interpreted the legacy of ancient beliefs. Klaus Bayer, professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago, summarized the attitude of colleagues towards Umm Seti: “She had visions and worshiped the ancient Egyptian gods. But she understood the scientific method and the standards of scientific work, which are generally not peculiar to nuts. "But she understood the scientific method and the standards of scientific work, which are generally not peculiar to nuts. "But she understood the scientific method and the standards of scientific work, which are generally not peculiar to nuts."
A fresco from the Temple of Seti in Abydos, Egypt.
She had prepared her own grave in her own garden in advance: "When I die, they will only have to lift the stove and push me inside." The fate and local authorities, alas, ordered otherwise. When on April 21, 1981, Umm Seti left - perhaps not forever again - the world, over which the sun god Ra spreads its arms-rays, the sanitary department forbade the burial of the body in the wrong place. Umm Seti was buried in the Coptic cemetery of the village of El-Araba-el-Madfuna, in an unmarked grave at the very edge of the road along which processions once marched to the Temple of Osiris.