Seti I began the temple in the thirteenth century BC but died before it was complete. His son, Ramesses II, took over, and the two halves of the building tell the story of two very different kings. Seti's chambers carry the delicate raised reliefs that made the temple famous, patient, refined, almost reverent. Ramesses, ever in a hurry and ever eager to advertise himself, switched to the faster sunk relief, gouging his figures into the stone, and filled the outer courts with scenes of his own achievements. He even left an inscription reproaching earlier kings, boasting that a good son completes his father's monuments. The temple is not a tomb. It was built to honor Osiris and the royal ancestors, very likely as a station on the processional route of the great Osiris festival that drew pilgrims to Abydos.

In a side corridor known as the Gallery of the List, a single wall carries one of the most quietly astonishing documents to survive from the ancient world. Carved in low relief, Seti and the young Ramesses are shown making offerings to their predecessors, and beside them runs a list of seventy-six royal cartouches stretching back to Menes, founder of the First Dynasty. For Egyptologists, it is a chronological backbone, a near-complete sequence of legitimate kings. But the list is also an act of political editing. Rulers deemed illegitimate or shameful were simply erased: the foreign Hyksos who once seized the throne, and Akhenaten, the heretic who tried to replace Egypt's gods with a single sun disk. To carve a name here was to grant a king eternity. To omit one was to unmake him.

Pass through the rear of the temple and the architecture changes character entirely. The Osireion is a vast, stark hall of red granite, its huge plain pillars deliberately built to resemble a royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It served as a symbolic burial place for Osiris, and scholars believe its central island, once ringed by water, was used to grow barley, a living image of the god rising green from the earth each year. The barley sprouted, withered, and sprouted again, acting out resurrection in the rhythm of the seasons. Today the Aswan Dam has raised the water table, and the floor of the Osireion lies permanently flooded, so that the granite now broods over its own dark reflection.

High on one architrave, a cluster of weathered hieroglyphs has launched a thousand internet theories. To some eyes they resemble a helicopter, a submarine, and an aircraft, proof, the claim goes, of ancient astronauts or lost technology. The reality is more ordinary and, in its way, more interesting. The marks are a palimpsest. Seti I carved a title there, He who repulses the nine enemies of Egypt; later, Ramesses II had it plastered over and recut with his own title. Over centuries the plaster crumbled, leaving fragments of both inscriptions overlapping. The eye, hungry for pattern, assembles the jumble into machines that the carvers never imagined. Egyptologists are unanimous on this, yet the temple keeps another, gentler modern legend. Dorothy Eady, an Englishwoman known as Omm Sety, settled at Abydos in 1956 convinced she had lived here before, tended the temple, and became one of its most knowledgeable guides until her death in 1981.