Naville's 1913 report judged the Osireion more archaic than Khafre's pyramid

October 23, 2026EgyptArchitectureShare

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Key facts

• Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray began work at the Osireion in 1902, and Edward Naville, a Swiss Egyptologist, arrived in 1913 under the Egypt Exploration Fund to complete their work.
• Naville concluded that there was 'no longer any doubt' that the structure was what Strabo called the fountain of Abydos - 'near the temple', not part of it - and remarkable for corridors whose ceilings were formed of enormous monolithic blocks.
• Naville wrote that there were as yet no certain indications of the date of construction, but that the style, the size of the materials and the complete absence of ornamentation all indicated great antiquity.
• Naville compared the Osireion's composition to the pyramid of Khafre, calling it 'of much more archaic character', and said he would not be surprised if it were the most ancient structure in Egypt.
• The video's presenters state their own position: the Osireion's construction is Old Kingdom, its alignment relates to the Seti I temple, and the 19th-Dynasty builders may have encountered it while digging foundations and diverted the temple's plan around it.
• The rear anti-chamber carries a single unfinished panel of relief carving attributed to Seti I, with partially smoothed walls ('marshmallowy' and unfinished) and other walls left flat, indicating an abandoned New Kingdom refurbishment of an older structure.
• The presenters note that hieroglyphs on that rear panel extend above where a vaulted ceiling would have begun, raising the possibility that the ceiling had already collapsed when the panel was carved or that the rear was originally open to the sky.
• During dredging in the basin, excavators reportedly recovered a statue of Osiris and a hook, and the site has since seen partial New Kingdom-style restoration work that has been halted.

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