1290-1213), the new monument itself became a focal point of ritual life at the site during the late New Kingdom and beyond (O’Connor 2009).īritish archaeologist Flinders Petrie had a different reason for calling it a “Portal” temple during his explorations here in 1902-03 (Fig. And after its construction in the 13thCentury BCE (c. After all, it was from this spot that generations of ancient pilgrims at Abydos had long begun the annual festival procession, starting out from the edge of the desert and winding their way south and west along the processional route as it snaked its way through the necropolis, linking the Temple of Osiris to what was thought to be his tomb at Umm el-Qa‘ab, the necropolis of Egypt’s earliest kings. Did its New Kingdom builders intend the temple to serve as an actual gateway for the festival procession of Osiris - an expression of their royal patronage of this ancient Mecca, by which they, masters of both the human and divine realms, raised the curtain on the festival’s performance each year? Perhaps. The curtain that separated the human from the mythic realm at Abydos was already ancient by the time Ramses II’s father, Seti I, laid the first stone of what would become a completed temple during his son’s reign (Adams 2019). It sits at a critical point in the sacred topography of ancient Abydos, the point where an invisible curtain was drawn between the world of the living and the land of the dead (Fig. The “Portal” Temple of Ramses II, a ruined jumble of tantalizing clues about the great king’s building activity in the sacred land of his royal ancestors at Abydos, has long been one of the site’s more puzzling monuments.
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