Seti I

The son of Ramesses I and the second king of the Nineteenth Dynasty, from a military family of the eastern Delta. He campaigned in the Levant and against the Libyans, restored monuments defaced during the Amarna years, and was the father of Ramesses II.

Seti I’s tomb is among the valley’s most extensive and elaborately decorated royal tombs. Its raised relief and funerary compositions make it especially useful for studying the care invested in a royal burial.

He campaigned in his first years into Canaan and Syria, took Kadesh briefly, fought the Libyans in the western desert and the Hittites in the north, and had the campaigns carved on the outside of the north wall of the Hypostyle Hall (a roofed hall supported by rows of columns) at Karnak — register upon register of marching, fighting and the presentation of prisoners, which is one of the great historical relief cycles of Egypt.

He built the temple at Abydos with its seven sanctuaries and its king list — a wall naming his royal predecessors in order, from which Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ay are absent. His mortuary temple (a temple for royal commemoration and divine worship, active during a king’s life and after death) at Qurna, on the west bank at Thebes, was finished by his son. And KV17 was cut: over a hundred metres of corridors and halls, every surface prepared and almost every one decorated, with an astronomical ceiling over the burial chamber.

The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak is principally associated with Seti I and Ramesses II. Seti’s decoration is particularly important for comparing raised relief with later work.

Stand in the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak and compare the two halves. On the north side the figures rise out of the surface and the modelling is deep and even; on the south side the same scenes are cut into it. Then walk out of the hall on the north side and follow the outer wall: the battle reliefs are there, at a scale that makes the point about what a royal war record was for. KV17 is his tomb.