Tagged “seti-i”
Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak
How did New Kingdom builders raise stone roof-beams weighing on the order of 70 tonnes onto columns 21 metres tall, and roof over a covered hall of some 5,000 square metres — and which of the proposed methods, giant earthen ramps or levering, actually did the heavy lifting?
c. 1290–1220 BCE (19th Dynasty; built by Seti I and Ramesses II, on foundations begun earlier) · Karnak, Luxor, EgyptAdded July 2026
HIGH WONDERThe Osirion at Abydos
Why did the builders of a delicate limestone temple raise, directly behind it, a stark megalithic hall of hundred-tonne granite sunk to the water table around a stone island — and does its archaic, 'cyclopean' style really mean it is older than the New Kingdom?
c. 1290 BCE (19th Dynasty, reign of Seti I; original date contested) · Abydos, Sohag Governorate, EgyptAdded July 2026
Temple of Seti I at Abydos
How did a temple that produced some of the most exquisitely precise painted relief carving in all of Egypt also become the birthplace of the world's most famous 'out-of-place artifact' — and what is really written on the eroded ceiling beam that so many mistake for a helicopter?
c. 1294–1279 BCE (reign of Seti I), completed under Ramesses II, 19th Dynasty, New Kingdom · Abydos, Sohag Governorate, EgyptAdded July 2026