MENMA'ATRA'
XIX Dynasty 1306-1290 a.C.

”Powerful bull crowned in Tebe and revives the Two Lands”

This was the resounding Horo name chosen by the king Sethi I at his coronation, when in 1290 BC he inherited the scepter of the dead Ramses I.
Sethi I, who had governed the country with his father for almost two years, when he ascended to the throne was already a mature man, of a vigorous physique, married to the lady Tuy (or Tuya), daughter of a general lieutenant, and father of the future heir to the throne, the young Ramses II.
The new sovereign demonstrated clear and precise ideas concerning his peoples’ fate.
Sethi I dreamed of bringing Egypt back to the power and stability it once had, canceling the events of the armaniano period.
His attention, in fact, was on the research of a political strategy, that wouldn’t let the monarchy fall back in the abyss of religious hegemony, as had happened during Akhenaton’s reign.
To avoid this happening again, the king continued the politic of the equilibrium of the power begun by his father Ramses T at the beginning of the XIX dynasty, continuing his work of restore and re-found of the temples and of the state.
Egypt so found in Sethi I a determined sovereign, with clear ideas who had great intentions for his country.
Analyzing the names in the pharaoh’s royal title, the new political tendency can be noticed.
Epithets and titles, in fact, expressed a kind of program summary, that went from the inner politics to the foreign one, but mostly it balanced Amon’s power with the one of the other gods of the Egyptian pantheon: for example, his pre-name Men-Maat-Ra, which means “May Ra’s Maat be stable” was accompanied by the epithet “Sovereign of Tebe” which was alternated by “Sovereign of Heliopolis”.
Even the name Sethi that probably means “Sethi’s one”, and the promoted the cult of god Seth in Avaris city – from where the king’s family probably came- was accompanied by the appellative “Loved by Ptah” which was alternated by “Loved by Amon”.
During Ramses’s I reign the future pharaoh Sethi had not only been the corregente but also the commander of the army, who cared for the safety of the borders.
And once again it’s actually one of the five names in the royal title that expresses the pharaoh’s military intentions.
Sethi I in fact was “The one of re-birth, whose strong arm rejects the Nine Bows”, but even the name of golden Horus was significant because it indicated that the king was “The one of the radiant rise, whose bows win all the countries”.
With the word “Nine Bows” the Egyptians indicated the traditional enemies of the empire: the Nubians, the Libyans, the Asians, the ittiti and the Mitanni. Among the pharaoh’s historical enemies the Tjehenu appeared, a Libyan tribe from the Western Desert, and the Erkheye, that indicated the Egyptians in the North, defeated in the archaic period from the Southern Egyptians.
But later the word indicated all the prisoners captured.
The warrior god Amon himself was often represented as he trampled the “Nine Bows”.
The bow, moreover, was the symbol above others of the warrior and, with his arrows, it had not only been one of the first arms used by men but soon became a divine attribute and symbol of the war and at the same time the hieroglyphic with which the word “descent” was written (in Egyptian “pedhu”).
If the king didn’t have during his reign the opportunity to actually submit the “Nine bows” he was careful to stop the foreign people who rebelled against his power or threatened to do so.
The first people who tasted his warrior quality were of Nubia who according to some historians corresponded to the ancient Yam (the Kerma region or Dongola area) while for others instead, it would be in the region of today which is between Eritrea and Etiopia.
The people in this part of Nubia rebelled against the Egyptian power and Sethi I answered to the rebels with an attack in his eighth year of reign. The victory of the pharaoh’s troops consolidated the egyptians’ control on the territory and, putting down the arms, Sethi I let his subjects take up the tools to build impressive buildings, that could show once more the power of the crown.
Among the architectural works in Nubia, in this period the hypostyle chamber was built inside the Nepata temple and various monuments in Buhen, Aksha, Kuban and Philae.
But it was Asia that worried the sovereign; in fact the Egyptian soldiers had to support four military campaigns, later immortalized on the outer side of the north wall of the great chamber with the columns in Karnak, built by Sethi I in his northern part; his son Ramses II will complete it, building the southern part.
The pharaoh had to reingorce the borders of the empire and for this, in the first years of his reign, the troops were busy fighting against foreign armies, and reached Qadesh, in Siria.
This way the king took back the control of the East territories, frightening the ittiti, whose king Mwwattalis didn’t consider opportune to stop the pharaoh’s advance, but preferred to sign a peace treaty, waiting for a better moment to counter-attack. In Asia the king didn’t care only for the war but re-launched even the economy, with a great gain for the country that could count upon the exploitation of new mines, mostly in the Eastern Desert, in areas such as Wadi Miah, Wadi Abbad and Wadi Allaqui, where the king favored his men’s tasks digging new water wells. Sethi I, when he resolved the problems concerning the borders of his empire, dedicated himself to the construction of great architectural works. After he had ordered to build the great hypostyle chamber in Karnak, at the sides of Amenhotep’s III colonnade, and his funeral temple in qurnah, in Western Tebe. The pharaoh gave to Egypt one of the most beautiful monuments in history, the great temple in Abydos, which has become one of the tourists’ preferred destinations thanks to the great state of preservation of part of its architectural structure and the relef on the walls. The construction of this sacred building was part of the politic of equilibrium wanted by the king to avoid that the country should find itself in the hands of Amon’s powerful cult, which was dangerous for the stability of the empire. This great building was in fact dedicated to the threefold in Abydos formed by Osiris, Isis and Horo and to the main divinities worshipped in the three main political centers in Egypt.
These were Amon for Tebe city, Ptah for Menfi and Ra-Harakhte for Heliopolis.
The temple in Abydos presented a structure similar to the one in the classic temples but multiplied for seven sanctuaries, the last one of which was dedicated to the deified Sethi himself. The building presented the “Table of Abydos” an important instrument for knowledge that has allowed the experts to re-build the chronology of the pharaohs who have ascended to the throne. The precious historical document is engraved in a relief in which the king has been immortalized beside his son, the prince Ramses II while he offers incense to the 76 pharaohs who reigned in Egypt from the beginning of its history, from Aha (Menes) to Sethi himself.
In this list is noticed the absence of those sovereigns who chose Amarna as the capital and of queen Hatshepsut, maybe considered an usurper.
Even Sethi’s I cenotaph has an important meaning for the symbolic and religious message concerning its construction. This monument is called Osireion and has a symbolic cosmic character because the pharaoh wanted it to represent the primordial mound from which the world was born.
So, the Osireion presents an underground structure on the top of which there are enormous monolithic pilasters in pink granite that enclose a chamber surrounded by water, that remembered the primordial one that lapped the mound from which everything began.
Through this monument Sethi I joined himself to Osiris, because on the sacred hill probably the king’s subjects cultivated barley, of which the growth symbolized the resurrection of the god (killed by his brother) of afterlife.
The Osireion included also a chamber in the shape of a sarcophagus and an astronomical ceiling with the goddess Nut and texts engraved on the walls that presented the instructions for the construction of a solar watch.
In Tell el Daba today, where there was the ancient city of Avaris, Sethi I ordered to build a summer palace, famous for its factory of polychrome tiles; besides the king chose as his royal residence Menfi, reinforcing his relations with the Delta area of which he was native.
At his death, thanks to the delicate politic of equilibrium that had privileged no part of Egypt more than another (as in religious ambit, he had worshipped particularly no divinity) Sethi I could give to his son Ramses II a strong country, prosperous and mostly with no political and religious tensions.