THE TEMPLE OF SETI I AT ABYDOS

Amice Calverley’s Record of the Temple of Seti I.

Commencing in 1933, a series of four huge (elephant folio sized) volumes was published entitled The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, edited by Alan H. Gardiner, and largely devoted to the superb and beautiful copies of the wall paintings of the temple done by Ms. Amice Calverley. The books were published jointly by the Egypt Exploration Society and the Universtity of Chicago. The vast expense of these magnificent publications was paid by John D. Rockefeller, as it was far beyond the capacities of the Society and the University. These volumes, which are a priceless record of Egyptian temple art, sacred likenesses, and the pharaonic cults, are extremely rare and difficult of access. Even when copies of the volumes can be found by researchers and scholars, they can never be removed from the institutional libraries fortunate enough to possess them. And as for the images in the volumes, which are their main purpose, no institution is willing to risk the possibility of damage to the precious books by attempting to scan them. Consequently, the seminal work done by Ms. Calverley has remained to all intents and purposes practically inaccessible for purposes of intensive or prolonged study. That was certainly not the original intention. Like all the publications of the Society in those days, the books were published free of copyright restrictions, but alas replication or copying of the books by scholars was nevertheless physically impossible until modern technology came along.

The Foundation has its own set of the four volumes, and has commenced a lengthy process of making high resolution scans of the entirety of Ms. Calverley’s images found in the four volumes. Although extremely high resolution scans have been made, they contain too much data to be accessible over the internet. The Foundation has therefore commenced the putting of this material onto the internet in medium resolution, commencing with whole images. The Foundation is extremely grateful to Dr. Chris Naunton, Director of the Egypt Exploration Society, for encouraging this project and giving it his and the Society’s blessing. All the costs of the project are being borne by the Foundation.

Plates can be viewed as:

• Jpegs with annotations
  by clicking on the thumbnail
• Very high resolution, zoomable images
  (All of Vols II-Vols IV currently have this function. ...We'll be adding more to Vol I soon)
• Very high resolution and compressed PDFs
  Available at the bottom of the page

Volume II: THE CHAPELS OF AMEN-RE', RE-HARAKHTI, PTAH & KING SETHOS. PDF (49 MB).

Volume III: THE OSIRIS COMPLEX. PDF (35 MB).

Volume IV: THE SECOND HYPOSTYLE HALL. PDF (83 MB).