Temple of Sety I: Abydos

by Farid Atiya, Lamis Fayed

The temple of Sety I at Abydos is famous for its excellent reliefs, many of which portray the warrior-king engaged in various ritual scenes with deities. These are beautifully portrayed with detailed captions.

60 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

Reviews

[Kathy]

This is only a small book with 72 pages but its a very nice book nevertheless. This is the only book I've found so far on Abydos that provides a good set of photos of the wall decoration in the temple. The start of the book gives a good background to Abydos and explains how different it is to many other ancient Egyptian temples. After that every second page has a full page colour photo of a wall decoration and an explanation of the scene.

The sheer quality of the wall decoration in this temple is amazing. You only see fragments of these scenes in other books so this alone makes this book worth getting. The thing that would most improve this book is line drawings showing the overall wall design that is being highlighted and more general views of the temple, but that would make a much bigger book. There is one other major book on Abydos - Abydos: Egypt's First Pharaohs and the Cult of Osiris - but even this book only provides passing glimpses of the interior decoration of the temple. If you want to see decent images of the temple interior this is a much better, though harder book to find.