Pioneers, researchers and travelers

For more than a century, the greatest names in Egyptology found their renown in Abydos and competed to restore its original splendor.

• By the middle of the eighteenth century Claude-Étienne Savary had been to Abydos:
  "After walking west for an hour, one comes upon the remains of Abydos, where Ozymandius built a magnificent temple in honor of Osiris, it was the only one in Egypt where dancers and musicians were prohibited from entering. This city, reduced to a simple village under Augustus' empire, is now only piles of uninhabited rubble. But, to the West of these ruins, Ozymandius' famous monument can still be seen. One first enters under an approximately sixty-foot-high portico, supported by two rows of thick columns. The immovable solidity of the edifice, the huge masses which make it up and the hieroglyphics which cover it make one appreciate the work of the Ancient Egyptians."
• The scientists of the Egyptian Expedition carried out the first cursory study of the layouts of the most accessible ruins. Edme Jommard reports in Volume IV of the Collection of Observations and Research of the Egyptian Expedition:
  "The interior of the building is perfectly preserved. The sculptures and the colors which covered them were nearly intact, and one had to admire the lively brightness of the blue and other hues which had been used in the paintings, as though they had just been finished. (...) The decoration, remarkable for the richness of its colors, is very simple in contrast to the architecture. There is little variety to be found in the columns, capitals and comices. Elsewhere, there is a great diversity of proportion, of character and of absolute size of these different architectural elements, which more or less harmoniously balances and contrasts them in the various rooms of the edifice, yet without ever violating the rules of symmetry. Here, symmetry rules supreme, and it would seem that the architecture was deliberately meant to be ornamentally sober, in order to make the sculptures, the reliefs or the frescos. which cover the walls and ceilings, stand out."
• Some thirty years later, Champollion passed al-Balyana but didn't stop; the Swiss, Charles Gleyre, did the same at approximately the same period; he was an important sketch artist and chronicler, whose pencil sketches and aquarelles are preserved in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne. Thebes' proximity seems to have made them both take shortcuts.
• The first scientific excavations were directed by Mariette between 1860 and 1863.Thanks to the French government's financial support, they were published as the Excavations done in Egypt, Nubia and the Sudan, by order of the Viceroy, with, as a subtitle, First Series - Gebel Barkal, Abydos. Mariette and his two assistants wrote the text, and the plates were done by the engraver, Devria. Two additional volumes appeared in 1869 and 1880. Fifteen years later, Amlineau replaced Mariette in the field and directed his efforts to the western zone of the site, in the locations known as Umm al-Qa'ab; it was then that the large Thinite necropolis was unearthed.
• The English expeditions, led by Sir Flinders Petrie, took the place of the French in the beginning of the twentieth century. At the bottom of a well to the north of Seti l's votive temple and near the remains of a sanctuary which seems to date back to the Old Kingdom, Petrie found several invaluable statuettes, one of which, in ivory, represented an unknown Thinite sovereign, wearing the Crown of Upper Egypt. A statue of Pharaoh Khufu, also in ivory, seven centimenters high, was even more valuable and is, as far as is presently known, the only effigy of the greatest builder in Egyptian history.
• After Petrie, Ayrton, Curelly and Weigall excavated other isolated foundations, amongst which were the cenotaphs of Senwosret III and Ahmosis. The Osireion was identified and uncovered by Ms. M. Murray and excavated from 1912 to 1914 by the Egypt Exploration Society, then operated by Naville. Various campaigns to restore Seti l's votive temple and its immediate surroundings went on until 1954.