Page 44 - The Flickering Cauldron Magazine - June 2022

where her husband took a teaching job in Iraq leaving behind his son Sety. In 1939 her husband however received custody of Sety.
After Omm Sety and her husband separated, Omm Sety moved to Naziet al-Samman near the Pyramids of Giza.
There she met the Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan, of the Department of Antiquities, who was taken by her knowledge and employed her to work as his secretary, draught woman, alongside him at the excavations at Giza.
She was to be the first of her kind. He could not be without her, significantly contributing to his work in transcribing hieroglyphs, drawings, and indexing.
While employed by Hassan she met many famous Egyptologists of that era, who all respected her and found her a valuable source for information. Ahmed Fakhry being one of them who on Hassan’s death, snapped her up to work with him during the excavations of Dashur, until it was terminated in 1956, leaving her unemployed.
At last she could now go to her beloved Abydos, and accepted a position there at 52 years old as a poorly paid draughts woman for the Temples of Abydos. Here she remained till the day she died.
She believed that Bentreshyt had served in the Temple of Seti and had made trips before to her sacred place. During which the Chief Inspector of the Antiquities Department wanted to test her claims, and he took her to a certain wall within the temple. As yet, the pictures and information of this wall had not been published or seen by anyone. He asked her to tell him where she was in the temple, what the pictures on the wall were and what they meant, drawing on her knowledge of the priestess that she claimed to be. He knew the answer, and to his complete astonishment, so did she, as she answered in detail!
She spent her time documenting and translating pieces from recent excavations of the temple area. She told them where they could find the gardens that she had talked about as a child. Excavations of the area indeed unearthed the gardens, which matched her descriptions completely.
To the alarm of the locals and the temple guards, she could also charm snakes, where she befriended a cobra within the temple, that she fed on a regular basis. A well known ancient Egyptian trait for the priests and priestess of Ancient Egypt.
Every morning and night she would visit the temple, reciting prayers and bringing offerings to the Chapel of Osiris. To her she was undoing Bentryshyt’s sin, that Seti I was in full approval of.
Here she stayed till she was 60 years old, whereby she was asked to retire by the Antiquities Department even though she helped to put the Temples of Abydos on the map. She convinced them to extend her retirement for another 5 years to continue her work and in 1969 she was forced to retire at 65 years old. She was given a pension of only $30 a month, which she supplemented with her needlework and her publications.
She then gained a part-time position as a tourist guide for the Temple of Seti with the Antiquities Department, explaining the symbols and drawings on the walls. Here she would enchant visitors and locals alike with her stories, which quickly spread.
Then in 1972, she suffered from a mild heart attack, which forced her to sell her house and move into a mudbrick house, which belonged to the adjacent home of her friend, Ahmed Soliman, and became part of his family. Omm Sety tells in her journal that on moving to her new home, Seti I came and carried out a ritual that consecrated her home, bowing to the statues of Osiris and Isis, that were kept in a shrine alcove.
Over the following years Omm Sety’s health started to decline leading up to her final years, with a fall that
44 | The Flickering Cauldron® Magazine - Omm Sety