Seti I

Seti I (d. c. 1279 BC) inherited a new dynasty barely two years old and gave it substance, restoring Egypt's position abroad and setting standards of craftsmanship that later ages regarded as a high-water mark. The son of Ramesses I and Queen Sitre, he had followed his father's path through military command and high office before acceding around 1290 BC. His own son, the future Ramesses II, was introduced early to war and ceremony and was made prince regent before Seti's death — a deliberate dynastic insurance the family had learned to value.

Seti's first regnal year saw him campaigning in Canaan, reasserting control over routes and vassals that had loosened since the Amarna period; battle reliefs on the north wall of the Karnak hypostyle hall record this and later operations in unusual topographic detail. Subsequent campaigns dealt with the Libyans on the western frontier and brought Egyptian forces against the Hittite sphere in Syria, where Seti captured Kadesh, though the city soon reverted to Hittite control. The confrontation he opened there would culminate in his son's famous battle a generation later.

His buildings are distinguished less by scale than by quality. At Karnak he carried out much of the great hypostyle hall begun under his father. At Abydos he built a temple of unusual L-shaped plan with seven sanctuaries, its painted raised reliefs often judged the finest of the New Kingdom; its corridor carries the Abydos King List, a roll of royal ancestors that pointedly omits Hatshepsut and the Amarna kings, defining the official memory of the past. Behind the temple he constructed the enigmatic Osireion. His mortuary temple rose at Qurna on the Theban west bank.

Seti died around 1279 BC and was buried in KV17, the longest and most completely decorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings, discovered by Giovanni Belzoni in 1817; its alabaster sarcophagus is now in London. His well-preserved mummy, recovered from the Deir el-Bahri cache, shows a man who died in middle age. The throne passed smoothly to Ramesses II.