Abydos has a gravity that few sites in Egypt can match. For thousands of years this was the holiest ground a pilgrim could reach — the burial place, so the ancients believed, of Osiris himself, god of the dead and lord of eternity. The earliest kings of Egypt were laid to rest in the desert behind it, and for centuries afterwards the faithful came to be buried near, or simply to leave a token at, the god's shrine. Out beyond the modest village of El-Araba el-Madfuna, with the pale cliffs rising behind, the place still carries the hush of somewhere that mattered enormously to the people who built it.

The Great Temple of Seti I is the heart of it, and its carving is simply the finest in Egypt. The reliefs here are cut in low, shallow relief of extraordinary delicacy — gods and pharaoh rendered with a softness and precision that flat photographs never quite convey. Seven chapels run side by side, each dedicated to a different deity, each once a complete world of ritual. In a side corridor is the Abydos King List, a long roll-call of cartouches naming the legitimate pharaohs back to the beginning — a document Egyptologists treasure. Behind the temple lies the Osireion, a massive, sombre structure of bare granite, half-flooded with dark Nile water, raw where the temple is refined.

Abydos sees far fewer visitors than its quality deserves, which is part of its spell. There is a second, ruined temple of Ramesses II nearby, its colour still clinging to the upper walls, and out in the desert the low mounds of Umm el-Qa'ab, where the very first pharaohs were entombed and where offering pots have piled up over millennia. Most travellers reach Abydos on a long day from Luxor, frequently paired with Dendera, and the reward for the early start and the drive is a site where you can stand in Seti's chapels in near silence and feel the weight of all that belief.