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THREE

Sety

“He appears not so much preserved as sleeping –but sleeping in the way that a leopard might…”

How Sety became a pharaoh of Egypt is a tale of the ebb and flow of dynastic fortunes. He was born towards the end of the 18th Dynasty, a golden age of expansion and empire lasting from 1550 – 1319 BC. In the beginning it was a dynasty of extraordinary exploration, temple building and high art, presided over by kings named Ahmose, Thutmosis and Amenhotep, and the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. A seemingly endless tide of tribute flowed into the royal coffers from Egypt’s vassal states, which stretched from Nubia in the south to the Euphrates in the east.

And then, two hundred years into this brilliant age, around the time that Sety was born, the vital energy of the empire suddenly made a dramatic shift with the rise of Amenhotep III’s son, Akhenaten. Whatever Akhenaten was – religious zealot or visionary – he was responsible for one of the most puzzling and misunderstood periods of Egypt’s long history. Within a few years of his ascension to the throne, he had upended the traditional priesthoods and worship and set himself up as the only son of the only supreme god, from whom all life emanated. But the old gods and centuries of tradition could not be wiped out in a stroke. Many voices privately decried what they saw as the wholesale destruction of the Order-of-Things – an interesting irony, since Akhenaten liked to refer to himself as Living-in-Truth, meaning that he was the very embodiment of the Order-of-Things.

Soon the edges of the delicately balanced empire began to fray. Vassal states sent desperate but futile pleas to Akhenaten’s court for help to fend off invaders at their walls. Meanwhile, the enigmatic, seemingly indifferent pharaoh was overseeing splendid ceremonies to the one god, the Aten, in his newly-built holy city far from the ancient Theban center. His artists and sculptors were kept busy creating works in a new, naturalistic style, which may have been a reflection of Akhenaten’s understanding of Living-in-Truth. He was living out a dream of paradise on earth with his beautiful wife Nefertiti and their six daughters.

By the time of his death – possibly at the hands of others – irreparable damage had been done to the stability of the kingdom.

Akhenaten’s dream died with him. His immediate successor, Tutankhamun, was just a boy (possibly Akhenaten’s younger brother or his son by his secondary wife Kiya). Tutankhamun’s short reign was dominated by his elderly vizier, Ay, and the powerful general Horemheb, who lost no time reestablishing the old gods and tearing down all reminders of Akhenaten’s existence. The name Akhenaten was expunged from the stones. If people referred to him at all it was as the criminal, or the heretic.

No full account of his life and times has yet been discovered. Except for the imploring letters from the besieged vassal kings, and Akhenaten’s own lyrical hymns to the Aten, we have almost nothing that would explain who he was and why he made his religious revolution. Some writers have even suggested that he had a connection with Moses. If we look to the art of the period we find some clues, but not enough to show a deeper meaning. The story of Akhenaten’s reign is an intriguing missing piece of Egypt’s history.

Following Tutankhamun’s early death Ay took the throne briefly, bringing the great 18th Dynasty to a sad and troubled end.

Whether Horemheb unseated Ay or became king after Ay’s death, no one really knows, but Horemheb was immensely popular and he possessed the qualities and determination to bring order back to Egypt. With his reign the 19th Dynasty began. It was now the year 1319 BC.

To give his claim to the throne legitimacy the aging Horemheb married a sister of Nefertiti who was not young herself. Since they had no children, he hand-picked his own successor, his vizier and general of the armies, Ramesses. Both men shared a driving ambition to rebuild what many believed had been so recklessly dismantled. At Horemheb’s death the double crown of Egypt passed to his trusted vizier.

Ramesses had come from an old military family in a part of the eastern Delta that worshipped the god Set as the warrior god. When Ramesses’ first son was born it was only natural that he would give the child the auspicious name of Sety – Set’s man.*

The boy Sety grew up in his father’s footsteps, becoming known as a gifted military officer and leader, as befitted his bloodline. Sety was probably in his late 30s when his father became pharaoh. Ramesses, by then a man of advanced age, promptly appointed Sety co-regent to assure a smooth succession. The reign, and life, of Ramesses would last only two more years.

It was 1306, and Sety was now king. He was also a man with a family. As a youth he had married a non-royal woman who had borne him a son, Pa-Ramessu, but by the time Sety came to the throne he was a widower. With his second wife, a noblewoman named Tuy, he had a second son, Ramesses.

Both boys were brought up in the family military tradition. There are records that in the early part of Sety’s reign Pa-Ramessu accompanied his father into battle. However close the relationship between father and older son might have been, one thing was inescapable: Pa-Ramessu could never succeed his father to the throne because his mother was not of royal blood. At some point the younger boy, Ramesses, was named co-regent instead. This period is described in Abydos: Holy City of Ancient Egypt:*

Now we can sense a tragedy in Sety’s personal and public life. His elder son apparently committed some great crime; perhaps he plotted against the lives of his father and little brother; probably we shall never know what he did. But whatever it was, it was punishable by death and disgrace in this world and the next. His body was found at the bottom of a deep pit at Medinet el Gurob in the Fayoum region. It lay in a fine stone sarcophagus from which the inscriptions had all been hammered out. But when photographed by infra-red light, the word “King’s son of Men-Maat-Ra, Pa-Ramessu” could be seen. The body… had never been mummified and was wrapped in a sheepskin; a disgrace accorded only to the worst type of criminal. Some forensic doctors have suggested that the man may have been buried alive.…We have little doubt that this early tragedy in the reign of Sety must have left its mark.

Sety ruled Egypt for 16 years, during which time he laid to rest any possible questions of his right to the throne of Egypt. Nothing could contain his driving energy. Early in his reign he led successful military campaigns to recover parts of the eastern empire; he oversaw the restoration of temples and monuments defaced by Akhenaten and employed the finest architects and artists in the kingdom to proclaim in stone the names and images of the old gods.

Sety died in 1290, probably in middle age, leaving the care of the newly vitalized kingdom to the irrepressible energies of his son, Ramesses II. After his death, Sety was laid to rest in a magnificent tomb in the Valley of the Kings, but within 300 years the tomb was looted of its treasures; even the wrappings around his mummified body were rudely stripped of their gold and precious jewels. It was an unfortunate fact that few royal tombs escaped ransacking by thieves acting either on their own behalf or as agents of later kings strapped for funds.

Soon after the plunder of Sety’s tomb his mummy was re-wrapped by the mortuary priest of the Valley of the Kings, who identified it with his seal and transferred it to a safer haven, the cliff tomb of Queen Ahmose-Inhapi near Deir el Bahri, not far from the Valley of the Kings. In that isolated tomb Sety’s body (along with other royal mummies whose Houses of Eternity had earlier been plundered) became part of the famous royal cache of 50 mummies opened by Emile Brugsch in 1881. The cache’s rock-cut chambers contained the remains of many of the greatest pharaohs of ancient Egypt, and their discovery caused a sensation all over the world, but in no place more than Egypt.

When the time came for the royal mummies to be transported by boat down the Nile to Cairo, a very strange thing happened: Throngs of Egyptians began streaming from their fields and houses to stand in solemn tribute along the riverbanks, the men firing guns into the air, the black-robed women calling out their shrill, timeless cries of mourning for the passing of their ancient kings.

At the Cairo Museum each of the mummies was tagged and given a catalog number. Sety became no. 61077.

For much of the 20th century his body was on display in Room 52 of the museum, along with his son Ramesses II and others from the royal cache, until President Sadat ordered the room closed to the public. He considered it a desecration that these noble ancestors of the Egyptian people should be objects of casual curiosity. Now, the Mummy Room has been reopened and visitors can walk among the sealed glass cases thinking their own thoughts about the silent figures within who had once lived in majesty as gods on earth. To look at some of them, it is hard to imagine their ever having lived and loved or that they once had warm blood coursing through their veins. And then there is Sety.

Head of the mummy of Sety I. (LL Company)

The face of Sety is an arresting one, handsome, elegant, his shaven head finely shaped. Of all the royal mummies, his seems closest to drawing breath at any moment. He appears not so much preserved as sleeping – but sleeping in the way that a leopard might, with a mysterious, vital tension. Sir G. Elliot Smith, the famous anatomist, took special note of Sety’s appearance in his 1912 book, The Royal Mummies. It was, he wrote, “one of the most perfect examples of manly dignity displayed in a mummy that has come from ancient Egypt.”

It was that face that Dorothy Eady held in her heart. The rest of the memories hadn’t begun to unfold yet, but they would.

*Set was not always a symbol of evil. While it was Set who slew his brother Osiris, Set was also the god of the desert and was called the Great-of-Strength. As such, he was the patron of the military.

*by Omm Sety and Hanny el Zeini, LL Company, 1981