Dynastic History|The Gallery of the Ancestors, Abydos — The Offering List That Left the Amarna Kings Out

Seti I died in about 1279 BCE, the year his son Ramesses II took the throne; Britannica and the American Research Center in Egypt both place his reign at roughly 1290 to 1279. His temple at Abydos passed to that son unfinished. One corridor was already carved. On its wall, in the passage running from the second hypostyle hall toward the hall where offering animals were butchered, stand 76 royal cartouches in two registers of 38, with a third register repeating Seti's own names nineteen times.

The scene at the head of the list shows Seti with the young Ramesses, who holds a papyrus roll and recites. This is not a chronology. It is a provisioning document. The formula is the standard offering text — a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer — addressed to each king in turn and delivered through the reigning king. To be on the wall is to be fed.

So the editing is the content. Out go eighteen Herakleopolitan rulers, the first four kings of the Eleventh Dynasty, the whole Second Intermediate Period including the Fifteenth Dynasty, the women who ruled as king, Sobekneferu and Hatshepsut, and the kings of Akhetaten: Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Neferneferuaten, Tutankhamun, Ay. Roughly seventy years after Akhenaten had a boundary cut around a new capital, the court that followed struck him off the roll of ancestors it fed.

Egyptology reads the wall anyway. It remains the only source for many names of the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties: a document composed to edit the record, now used as the record. The corridor is on the visitor route through the temple, and the cartouches are still legible along its length.

📸 Cover: the king list in the temple of Seti I at Abydos, Olaf Tausch, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons