The plan of an honest ruler.
Around 1300 BCE, as today, gold was big business. King Sety I personally led an expedition into the eastern desert, to establish a new mining operation. Back in the Nile Valley, high-ranking officials leave monuments testifying to their work delivering, securing, and recording that gold. And thanks to art and artefacts, we can reconstruct the items these gold-workers produced. From the Red Sea Mountains to the Temple of Abydos, we follow the paths of gold…
Banner image: Sety’s temple at Kanais in the Wadi Barramiya (Photo Mutnedjmet).
For records of Sety and his contemporaries, see Kenneth Kitchen. Ramesside Inscriptions, Volume I. Versions: Hieroglyphs; English translations; Commentary and References.
Sety’s Temple at Kanais in the Wadi Barramiya.
Sety’s monuments including the Abydos and Kanais temples, in P. J. Brand, The Monuments of Seti I: Epigraphic, Historical and Art Historical Analysis (2000). Available free online at Academia.edu.
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Bibliography
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- P. J. Brand, Ramesses II: Egypt’s Ultimate Pharaoh (Columbus, 2023).
- J. C. Cooper, Toponymy on the Periphery: Placenames of the Eastern Desert, Red Sea, and South Sinai in Egyptian Documents from the Early Dynastic Until the End of the New Kingdom (Probleme der Ägyptologie 39; Leiden, 2020).
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- H. Gauthier, ‘Le temple de l’Ouâdi Mîyah (el Knaïs)’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 17 (1920), 1–38.
- M. F. Guerra, ‘Reflections on Gold: Colour and Workshop Practices in Egypt’, in S. Quirke et al. (eds), Ancient Egyptian Gold: Archaeology and Science in Jewellery (3500-1000 BC) (Cambridge, 2023), 105–128.
- K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions Historical and Biographical, I (Oxford, 1975).
- K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated: Notes and Comments, I (Oxford, 1993).
- K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated: Translations Volume I: Ramesses I, Sethos I and Contemporaries (2nd edn, Wallasey, 2017).
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- G. T. Martin, Tutankhamun’s Regent: Scenes and Texts from the Memphite Tomb of Horemheb (EES Excavation Memoir 111; London, 2016).
- S. Quirke, ‘Centres of Goldworking in Ancient Egypt: Egyptological Questions and Sources’, in S. Quirke et al. (eds), Ancient Egyptian Gold: Archaeology and Science in Jewellery (3500-1000 BC) (Cambridge, 2023), 27–74.
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