The Osireion – links & further reading

Thanks as always to everyone who has watched my talk ‘MEGALITHS in ANCIENT EGYPT: The Osireion’. This was broadcast via YouTube on 6 November 2025 and is available to channel members (Lapis level) to watch any time here and below. To become a member please go here.

In 1903 the archaeologists Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray made an extraordinary discovery to the east of the famous temple of Sety I at Abydos. At a level below ground they found a building constructed of huge blocks of granite, limestone and sandstone – megaliths – far larger than were usually used in Egyptian monuments. Numerous cartouches of Sety I suggest this was an extension of his monument, and the decoration resembling texts and images from tombs in the Valley of Kings in an entrance corridor have led to the conclusion that it is a funerary monument although not a tomb – perhaps a cenotaph. Its unique design has led to much debate among scholars about its age and purpose ever since its discovery.

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My slides are available via Slideshare as usual, here. All images in the presentation are my own unless otherwise stated.

The printed volumes of the Topographical Bibliography… / ‘Porter & Moss’ from which my plans of Abydos and the temples of Sety I and Ramesses II were taken can be downloaded in PDF form from the Griffith Institute website here.

Margaret Murray’s report, The Osireion at Abydos (1904), includes her description of the discovery of the monument and the first excavations, and is available for free via archive.org.

The excavations were continued under Edouard Naville and later Henri Frankfort, and the latter’s final excavation report, The Cenotaph of Sety I at Abydos (1933) is also available via archive.org in two volumes: text and plates.

The Naville and Frankfort excavations were carried out under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Society and their incredible archive of photographs taken during the work – like the one below – is here.

Image from Abydos (AB) sub-archive. AB.NEG.25.FRANKFORT.04. Available online the Society’s archive at flickr.com. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.

David O’Connor was the head of a family of research projects at Abydos under the Penn-Yale-NYU umbrella for half a century. His overview of the site is Abydos: Egypt’s First Pharaohs and the Cult of Osiris.

Charles Herzer’s Synopsis Study of the Osireion at Abydos is a fantastic single-volume resource for images of the monument and much new interpretation and is available via academia.edu.

The best single volume on the Amduat and other ‘books of the afterlife’ which feature heavily in the decoration of the Osireion is Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife.

Rosalie David’s volume Temple Ritual at Abydos goes over the texts and images in the Sety temple with a fine tooth comb – if you want to know what any individual scene means then this is the book for you.

For a longer discussion, and references to further reading, about the 25th / 26th Dynasty tombs that appear to have been inspired by the design of the Osireion, please take a look at my talk ‘Kings in Thebes’ and the accompanying notes here.