Omm Sety's Egypt. Hanny el Zeini
his reign he led successful military campaigns to recover parts of the eastern empire; he oversaw the restoration of temples and monuments defaced by Akhenaten and employed the finest architects and artists in the kingdom to proclaim in stone the names and images of the old gods.
Sety died in 1290, probably in middle age, leaving the care of the newly vitalized kingdom to the irrepressible energies of his son, Ramesses II. After his death, Sety was laid to rest in a magnificent tomb in the Valley of the Kings, but within 300 years the tomb was looted of its treasures; even the wrappings around his mummified body were rudely stripped of their gold and precious jewels. It was an unfortunate fact that few royal tombs escaped ransacking by thieves acting either on their own behalf or as agents of later kings strapped for funds.
Soon after the plunder of Sety’s tomb his mummy was re-wrapped by the mortuary priest of the Valley of the Kings, who identified it with his seal and transferred it to a safer haven, the cliff tomb of Queen Ahmose-Inhapi near Deir el Bahri, not far from the Valley of the Kings. In that isolated tomb Sety’s body (along with other royal mummies whose Houses of Eternity had earlier been plundered) became part of the famous royal cache of 50 mummies opened by Emile Brugsch in 1881. The cache’s rock-cut chambers contained the remains of many of the greatest pharaohs of ancient Egypt, and their discovery caused a sensation all over the world, but in no place more than Egypt.
When the time came for the royal mummies to be transported by boat down the Nile to Cairo, a very strange thing happened: Throngs of Egyptians began streaming from their fields and houses to stand in solemn tribute along the riverbanks, the men firing guns into the air, the black-robed women calling out their shrill, timeless cries of mourning for the passing of their ancient kings.
At the Cairo Museum each of the mummies was tagged and given a catalog number. Sety became no. 61077.
For much of the 20th century his body was on display in Room 52 of the museum, along with his son Ramesses II and others from the royal cache, until President Sadat ordered the room closed to the public. He considered it a desecration that these noble ancestors of the Egyptian people should be objects of casual curiosity. Now, the Mummy Room has been reopened and visitors can walk among the sealed glass cases thinking their own thoughts about the silent figures within who had once lived in majesty as gods on earth. To look at some of them, it is hard to imagine their ever having lived and loved or that they once had warm blood coursing through their veins. And then there is Sety.
Head of the mummy of Sety I. (LL Company)
The face of Sety is an arresting one, handsome, elegant, his shaven head finely shaped. Of all the royal mummies, his seems closest to drawing breath at any moment. He appears not so much preserved as sleeping – but sleeping in the way that a leopard might, with a mysterious, vital tension. Sir G. Elliot Smith, the famous anatomist, took special note of Sety’s appearance in his 1912 book, The Royal Mummies. It was, he wrote, “one of the most perfect examples of manly dignity displayed in a mummy that has come from ancient Egypt.”
It was that face that Dorothy Eady held in her heart. The rest of the memories hadn’t begun to unfold yet, but they would.
*Set was not always a symbol of evil. While it was Set who slew his brother Osiris, Set was also the god of the desert and was called the Great-of-Strength. As such, he was the patron of the military.
*by Omm Sety and Hanny el Zeini, LL Company, 1981
FOUR
Signs of Egypt Everywhere
“We were – King Sety and I – on the verge of startingan odyssey of some sort.” OS
London, 1920. Ever since Sety’s appearance to her two years earlier, Dorothy had been having a recurring dream. It excited her and disturbed her deeply, and she knew it was true. She was an Egyptian girl and she was lying on a woven mat in a very large room with other women and girls. It was night. Then the dream would shift to another room, this one underground, with a channel of water flowing around the perimeter. It was a very sacred place, she knew, but she had not been brought here to take part in a ritual. She was being confronted by an austere man in high priest’s garb, and there were others in the room too, looking at her as if in judgment. The man was beating her because she would not tell him what he demanded. Nothing could make her say what he wanted her to say, and the beating continued. When she woke she would be drenched in sweat and screaming, and the family would know that Dorothy had had another of “those dreams.”
Dorothy was now 16, pursuing her independent studies and living at home. England was not where she wanted to be, but for the time being it would have to do.
The war had taken an awful toll on the country in every way. For Dorothy’s father, a master tailor, it meant a drastic falling-off of his previously well-heeled clientele. But Reuben Eady saw it as a chance to re-invent himself and do something he had always dreamed of. Off and on through the years he had performed on stage as a juggler and magician; not that he had been able to make a living at it, but he knew a thing or two about music halls and theaters, and he loved them. His wife, Caroline, had already put up with a lot from her eccentric little family, so when Reuben came home one day and announced that he had just closed his shop for good she could only look at him and sigh, “What next?”
He didn’t really know, exactly. He had ideas in his head, something to do with the newly emerging cinema industry. He could imagine having his own theater. But before he decided on anything he had to give himself some breathing space, take the family on a trip, look around the British Isles to see where the opportunities lay. If Caroline initially resisted the plan, Dorothy didn’t; she didn’t need convincing to set off on an adventure into the unknown.
Early in the Eady family’s exploratory tour, as they were driving west through the Wiltshire countryside, they stopped at Stonehenge. Of course Dorothy had seen pictures of it before, but to be standing right there, with the morning light casting eerie shadows over the great towering stones – there was something so Egyptian about it all, she thought. To her eyes the roughly shaped obelisks had been arranged into a temple for worshipping the sun, like the obelisks of Egypt. She was sure there must have been an “Egyptian intervention” here.
While her parents strolled, Dorothy’s curiosity led her to a nearby group of Bronze Age barrows and graves. Catching a glint of color at her feet, she bent down and picked up a handful of earth that contained a number of blue and green particles, and she shouted for her mother and father to come quickly to see what she had found. When the Eadys looked at her discovery they were not impressed, but Dorothy knew what she had: Egyptian mummy beads, and she was right. She was not the first person to have found mummy beads in the area of Stonehenge, or even scarabs. At the very least they were proof of ancient trade between the Mediterranean and the British Isles, not to mention even more intriguing possibilities.
She carefully placed her finds in a small box, intending to add this new treasure to her tiny collection of Egyptian artifacts that had made their way into her hands. Egypt seemed to be constantly reminding her that sooner or later she would board a ship heading for the Black Land. She felt stranded in the British Isles. There was so much yet to know, so much she couldn’t truly understand until she had kissed the precious soil of Egypt and begun to unravel the mystery of herself.
The family tour did not interrupt her study of Egyptology; there were modest museums and libraries all along the way. The science of Egyptology was still in its infancy, but a prodigious quantity of publications about Egyptian history and archaeology were streaming onto the book market, written by world famous pioneers such as J. H. Breasted, Hermann Junker and Dr. Budge. As much as Dorothy appreciated their work – and Dr. Budge’s especial kindness to her – there was one Egyptologist who warranted her highest esteem: W. Flinders Petrie (he would be knighted in 1923 for his work). On this giant of archaeology she bestowed her silent adoration