Today it is a small settlement called El Araba el Madfuna, located about 200 km north of Luxor, downstream of the Nile. In ancient times this place was called Ta Ur - “Great Land”.
The Greeks called this place Abydos, and the ancient Egyptians called Abiju. For millennia, it was the largest religious center of Egyptian civilization.
The oldest archaeological sites found in Abydos date back to the pre-dynastic period. These are the burials of the Nagada culture dating back to the 4th millennium BC. The first pharaohs chose Abydos as their burial place. Here is the tomb of King Narmer - the unifier of Egypt and the ancestor of the 1st dynasty of the pharaohs. To the southwest of Abydos is the Pega Gorge. From here, according to the ideas of the ancient Egyptians, Ro-Setau began - the mysterious paths to the kingdom of the dead.
Initially, according to historians, in Abydos there was a sanctuary of the lord of the underworld, the jackal-headed god Hentiamenti. Later, when this role passed to Osiris, Abydos became the center of the cult of this god. The fact is that, according to one of the oldest legends, it was here that the head of Osiris was buried, killed by his brother Set, who dismembered the body of Osiris into seven parts and scattered them throughout the country. For the ancient Egyptians, Abydos was a kind of "Mecca" - the main spiritual center and place of pilgrimage. Every year, the mysteries of Osiris were celebrated here, associated with ideas about the posthumous existence of man. Almost every pharaoh built here his own tomb or cenotaph (false burial) or erected a statue or stele. Ordinary Egyptians also tried at least once in their lives to make a pilgrimage to this sacred place.
Temple of Seti I.
One of the best-preserved monuments of Ancient Egypt is located in Abydos - the funeral temple of the 19th dynasty Pharaoh Seti I, who ruled at the turn of the XIV-XIII centuries. BC. Seti dedicated his temple to the seven great gods of Egypt. The temple has an unusual L-shape in plan. Surprisingly, this complex is one of the few that time has spared. In this huge temple complex, both the ceiling and numerous colorful frescoes are perfectly preserved. Numerous windows have been made in the upper part of the walls, as well as in the ceiling. The rays of light, penetrating into them during the day, consistently illuminate the exquisite painted reliefs of the walls and columns of the temple. The paints have survived surprisingly well and these images are rightfully considered to be outstanding masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art.
Fresco in the temple of Seti I.
This temple complex is located about five kilometers from the Nile bed. Historians believe that in ancient times a wide canal was dug from the river, along which ships and boats sailed almost to the temple itself. The channel has not survived to this day.
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The funeral temple of Seti I is also famous for the fact that it houses one of the few dynastic lists of the pharaohs of Egypt, which is called the “Abydos list”. Cartouches of 76 Egyptian kings are carved on the walls of the corridor connecting the two parts of the temple. The list begins with the first pharaoh, the unifier of Egypt, Menes, and ends with the name of Seti himself. On the basis of this list, the periodization of the history of Ancient Egypt was built. Attempts to put in order the chronological sequence of the reign of the pharaohs and the main milestones of Egyptian history were made in ancient times, but most of these chronologies have not reached us. Only four of them survived partially, including the “Abydos list”. And it is strikingly different from the other three. The difference is that it begins with the name of the first pharaoh Menes,while in the rest of the lists the era of the first dynasty of kings is preceded by other periods that lead Egyptian history tens of thousands of years into the depths of time.
Fragment of the “Abydos list”.
The first of them - the Palermo stone (named after the place of storage - the Museum of Palermo) is the oldest. It was created during the V-th dynasty and dates back to the XXV century. BC. Those. it was compiled a thousand years before the reign of Pharaoh Seti I. On this black diorite slab, in addition to the first five dynasties of the pharaohs, the names of 120 pre-dynastic kings are carved. Unfortunately, the Palermo stone is only a fragment of a huge monolith, which, according to researchers, was up to two meters in size.
Another list - the Turin papyrus is very poorly preserved. Nevertheless, it can contain the names of ten neteru gods who ruled Egypt in the era of the First Time (the Egyptians called him Zep-Tepi). Moreover, their names are inscribed in the cartouches in the same way as the names of all the pharaohs were written. The dates of their reign were also indicated on the papyrus, but these parts of the text have not survived. But a column of text has survived, which contains a list of mortal kings who ruled Upper and Lower Egypt after the era of the gods but before the pharaoh Menes. The surviving fragments of the text speak of nine such "dynasties" and even give their names, among which Shemsu-Gor (companions or followers of Horus, the last of the ruling gods) are especially noted. At the end of the text, the result is summed up: "Venerable Shemsu-Gor - 13,420 years, reign to Shemsu-Gor - 23,200 years, in total - 36,620 years." Sure,such periods of life of the ancient Egyptian civilization in no way fit into the generally accepted historical concept of the development of human civilization.
The Turin papyrus is also dated to the 19th dynasty and dates back to around the 13th century. BC. Those. it was created during the reign of Seti I or a little later. This is where the question arises: why Seti began his list of kings with Menes, cutting off previous eras from him. This is all the more strange, since the rulers of all ancient civilizations derived their lineages directly from the gods - the founders of their states. The pharaohs of Egypt did the same. What was Seti I guided by in rejecting the divine lineage? He could not not know the official history of his country. Moreover, a thousand years later, such a deep antiquity of the Egyptian civilization, numbering tens of millennia, was also recorded in the official history.
Egyptian priest Manetho (the Greeks called him Manetho) in the III century. BC. compiled an extensive and widely recognized in the ancient world, the history of Egypt. In it, he gave a detailed list of the kings of the dynastic period. By the way, Maneto was the first to divide the chronology of the rulers into 31 dynasties, before that the Egyptians themselves did not carry the pharaohs to the dynasties. This scheme was used by Egyptologists as the basis for the modern periodization of ancient Egyptian history. But at the same time, scientists also took and threw out the entire pre-dynastic era from the history of Manetho. But Manetho himself began his periodization also from the era of the First Time, when the gods ruled Egypt, starting with Ra and ending with Horus. “They were the first to have power in Egypt. Subsequently, the royal power passed without interruption from one to another … for 13900 years … After the gods for 1255 years, the demigods ruled;after them, another line reigned for 1817 years. Then the next thirty kings ruled for 1790 years, and then ten - 350. Then came the reign of the spirits of the dead … which lasted 5813 years …”. Thus, before the unification of Egypt by Menes, the country's history already totaled 24,925 years! And that was not the dubious interpretation of one ancient historian. Herodotus lived before Maneto. In the second book of his "History", dedicated to Egypt, Herodotus wrote that the priests told him that from the time of the first king of Egypt to the present time (i.e. to the 5th century BC), 341 generations of people have passed and the same there were high priests and rulers. From which Herodotus calculated the duration of the existence of Egyptian civilization equal to approximately 11340 years. At the same time, Herodotus specifically emphasizes that this was the time of the reign of mortal people, and before them “the gods reigned in Egypt,who lived together with people …”. The last of them was Horus, the son of Osiris.
Those. Herodotus was also well aware of the official (for that time) history of Egypt. Another famous ancient historian, Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the 1st century. BC, wrote that in the beginning, for 18,000 years, Egypt was ruled by gods and heroes, the last of whom was Horus. Mortals, according to the Egyptians themselves, ruled their country for a little less than 5,000 years. Despite the fact that the figures of different ancient sources differ from each other, nevertheless, they are the same in one thing: the history of Egyptian civilization totaled tens of thousands of years.
Modern scholars rely in their research both on the periodization of Manetho and on the work of Herodotus and Diodorus of Siculus. But they do it selectively, according to the rule "we play here, we don't play here, we wrap the fish here." It turns out that European scientists, after two hundred years of studying Egyptian antiquities, know the history of Egypt much better than the ancient Egyptians themselves knew it two, three and even five thousand years ago? Isn't that too presumptuous?
One could, of course, argue that from the pre-dynastic era on the territory of Egypt there is no archaeological evidence of a highly developed civilization. But is it really so? Maybe there is such evidence, but they do not want to take them for so ancient, but are attributed to much later times.
To the western wall of the funeral temple of Seti I, there is another building that is called Osirion. Already in ancient times, there was a legend that it was in this temple that the head of Osiris was buried. Osirion was discovered by the famous Egyptologist F. Petri in 1903, but only in 1914 the building was completely cleared of sand. The fact is that the floor level of Osirion is located about 8 m below the level of the Temple of Seti. Professor Neville, who cleared this complex, believed that Osirion was one of the most ancient buildings in Egypt. But after several inscriptions on behalf of Seti I were discovered on its walls in the 1920s, this building was declared a cenotaph (false tomb) of this pharaoh. This is how it is designated in modern guidebooks to Egypt. Although many researchers are much more cautious in sayingthat the exact dating of Osirion is very difficult.
Types of Osirion.
Any Egyptologist will confirm that the kings of Ancient Egypt, without any embarrassment, engraved their names on more ancient monuments or products. Thus, the presence of Seti's “autographs” on the walls of Osirion is by no means direct evidence that it was this king who built this structure. Moreover, on one of the walls of the building there is a lengthy inscription of Seti's grandson, Pharaoh Merneptah, which says that this king carried out the repair work of Osirion. But the repair of the structure, which is several decades old, in this particular case, seems completely unlikely. The fact is that Osirion was erected using the technique of the so-called megalithic masonry. The whole building is made of huge monolithic granite blocks. The stone is carefully processed, the blocks are fitted to each other without any gap and without the use of mortar. The central part of the building has two colonnades of ten rectangular columns of gray granite. The cross-section of each such column is a square with a side of 2.5 m, the height of the column is about 4 meters. Those. the weight of each of these monoliths is approximately 65 tons! And the granite columns also have ceilings made of the same stone - architraves.
Osirion's masonry.
This construction technique has nothing to do with the one that was used in the construction of the funeral temple of Seti I. As well as there are no analogies between the completely stingy ascetic architecture of Osirion and the fanciful decor of the temple of Seti.
But in Egypt there are several similar architectural objects. First of all, it is the Temple of the Valley, located next to the great Sphinx at Giza. This structure is attributed to Pharaoh Khafre, the builder of the second of the great pyramids. But this time of the IV dynasty and the era of Seti I is separated by more than a thousand years. But the official science somehow does not pay attention to this. As well as the difference in construction techniques.
Another remarkable architectural fact is associated with Osirion. In several places on the outer wall of the building, there is a unique technique of laying monolithic blocks, the so-called “polygonal laying”. The corners of some monoliths have a complex polygonal profile, and such a block is joined to an adjacent one, which has corresponding grooves in the corners, according to the principle of a puzzle. This technology is extremely rare for the monuments of Ancient Egypt. It is found only on the Giza plateau and in Sakkara in the facing of some pyramids, as well as in the same Valley Temple. Moreover, there are small rectangular projections on the obverse of some of the Osirion granite blocks. Their functional purpose is completely unclear. In addition, the following point should be noted: in order to leave such a protrusion on the front side of the block, with an area of 2-3 square meters,the rest of the surface should be cut off. And these are bronze instruments? In Egypt, blocks with such protrusions can be seen only on some of the facing blocks in Giza - on the Menkaur pyramid and on the small pyramids companions of the Khufu (Cheops) pyramid.
The most interesting thing is that such architectural techniques as polygonal masonry and protrusions on the front surface are known only in one part of the world. They are found in the cyclopean (and also granite) buildings of Peru - in Machu Picchu, Cuzco, Sacsayhuaman. Scientists attribute these buildings to the Incas, but here the situation is similar to what we see in the story of Osirion. In any case, representatives of official science prefer not to pay attention to such architectural "trifles". Indeed, what can be in common between Ancient Egypt and the civilizations of Peru, separated by millennia in time and thousands of kilometers in space?
Magazine "Itogi", N 15. ANDREY ZHUKOV