Chapter 45
The Works of Men and Gods (Cont)
Frankfort's facts
Later to enjoy great prestige and influence as professor of Pre-Classical Antiquity at the University of London, Frankfort spent several consecutive digging seasons re-clearing and thoroughly excavating the Osireion between 1925 and 1930. During the course of this work he made discoveries which, so far as he was concerned, 'settled the date of the building':
- A granite dovetail in position at the top of the southern side of the main entrance to the central hall, which was inscribed with the cartouche of Seti I.
- A similar dovetail in position inside the eastern wall of the central hall.
- Astronomical scenes and inscriptions by Seti I carved in relief on the ceiling of the northern transverse chamber.
- The remains of similar scenes in the southern transverse chamber.
- An ostracon (piece of broken potsherd) found in the entrance passage and bearing the legend 'Seti is serviceable to Osiris'. [22]
The reader will recall the lemming behaviour which led to a dramatic change of scholarly opinion about the antiquity of the Sphinx and the Valley Temple (due to the discovery of a few statues and a single cartouche which seemed to imply some sort of connection with Khafre). Frankfort's finds at Abydos caused a similar volte-face over the antiquity of the Osireion. In 1914 it was 'the most ancient stone building in Egypt'. By 1933, it had been beamed forward in time to the reign of Seti I-around 1300 BC-whose cenotaph it was now believed to be. [23]
Within a decade, the standard Egyptological texts began to print the attribution to Seti I as though it were a fact, verifiable by experience or observation. It is not a fact, however, merely Frankfort's interpretation of the evidence he had found.
The only facts are that certain inscriptions and decorations left by Seti appear in an otherwise completely anonymous structure. One plausible explanation is that the structure must have been built by Seti, as Frankfort proposed. The other possibility is that the half-hearted and scanty decorations, cartouches and inscriptions found by Frankfort could have been placed in the Osireion as part of a renovation and repair operation undertaken in Seti's time (implying that the structure was by then ancient, as Naville and others had proposed).
What are the merits of these mutually contradictory propositions which identify the Osireion as (a) the oldest building in Egypt, and (b) a relatively late New Kingdom structure?
Proposition (b)-that it is the cenotaph of Seti I-is the only attribution accepted by Egyptologists. On close inspection, however, it rests on the circumstantial evidence of the cartouches and inscriptions which prove nothing. Indeed part of this evidence appears to contradict Frankfort's case. The ostracon bearing the legend 'Seti is serviceable to Osiris' sounds less like praise for the works of an original builder than praise for a restorer who had renovated, and perhaps added to, an ancient structure identified with the First Time god Osiris. And another awkward little matter has also been overlooked. The south and north 'transverse chambers', which contain Seti I's detailed decorations and inscriptions, lie outside the twenty-foot-thick enclosure wall which so adamantly defines the huge, undecorated megalithic core of the building. This had raised the reasonable suspicion in Naville's mind (though Frankfort chose to ignore it) that the two chambers concerned were 'not contemporaneous with the rest of the building' but had been added much later during the reign of Seti I, 'probably when he built his own temple'. [24]
To cut a long story short, therefore, everything about proposition (b) is based in one way or another on Frankfort's not necessarily infallible interpretation of various bits and pieces of possibly intrusive evidence.
Proposition (a)-that the core edifice of the Osireion had been built millennia before Seti's time-rests on the nature of the architecture itself. As Naville observed, the Osireion's similarity to the Valley Temple at Giza 'showed it to be of the same epoch when building was made with enormous stones'. Likewise, until the end of her life, Margaret Murray remained convinced that the Osireion was not a cenotaph at all (least of all Seti's). She said,
It was made for the celebration of the mysteries of Osiris, and so far is unique among all the surviving buildings of Egypt. It is clearly early, for the great blocks of which it is built are of the style of the Old Kingdom; the simplicity of the actual building also points to it being of that early date. The decoration was added by Seti I, who in that way laid claim to the building, but seeing how often a Pharaoh claimed the work of his predecessors by putting his name on it, this fact does not carry much weight. It is the style of the building, the type of the masonry, the tooling of the stone, and not the name of a king, which date a building in Egypt. [25]
This was an admonition Frankfort might well have paid more attention to, for as he bemusedly observed of his 'cenotaph', 'It has to be admitted that no similar building is known from the Nineteenth Dynasty.' [26]
Indeed it is not just a matter of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Apart from the Valley Temple and other cyclopean edifices on the Giza plateau, no other building remotely resembling the Osireion is known from any other epoch of Egypt's long history. This handful of supposedly Old Kingdom structures, built out of giant megaliths, seems to belong in a unique category. They resemble one another much more than they resemble any other known style of architecture and in all cases there are question-marks over their identity.
Isn't this precisely what one would expect of buildings not erected by any historical pharaoh but dating back to prehistoric times? Doesn't it make sense of the mysterious way in which the Sphinx and the Valley Temple, and now the Osireion as well, seem to have become vaguely connected with the names of particular pharaohs (Khafre and Seti I), without ever yielding a single piece of evidence that clearly and unequivocally proves those pharaohs built the structures concerned? Aren't the tenuous links much more indicative of the work of restorers seeking to attach themselves to ancient and venerable monuments than of the original architects of those monuments-whoever they might have been and in whatever epoch they might have lived?
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