Behind the Temple of Seti I at Abydos is a sunken hall of colossal stonework built as a cenotaph, a symbolic tomb, for Osiris. The central chamber is limestone and sandstone dressed to look like a Valley of the Kings tomb, and at the middle of it a stone island stands surrounded by a channel of water fed from below, more than 34 feet down and still connected to the water table. The entrance tunnel runs 226 feet north to south. Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray found it again in 1902 and 1903, and the Egypt Exploration Society’s 1933 work turned up cartouches reading Menmaatre is Beneficial to Osiris, which is Seti I, around 1294 to 1279 BCE; P.J. Brand went through them again in 2000 and confirmed it. Later dynasties scratched their own names for it on the walls: the hidden place of the underworld, and the birth house of Isis.
Abydos, Egypt
See it on the map
