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This chapter examines the vogue in 17th- and 18th-century opera for dramatizing the episode of Xerxes at the Hellespont. Thus, one of the most important ways in which people were educated about the Persian Wars at this time was through the imaginative fictions sung by the stars of this hugely popular form of musical theatre. The chapter considers the reason for this trend, as well as the way in which transformations of the familiar story illustrate the changing tastes in adapting history to the exigencies of the operatic stage. The discussion centres on Minato's libretto Il Xerse as set by the leading Venetian composer Cavalli (1654), the remarkable Xerxes in Abydos by J. P. Förtsch (1688), who was a leading figure in the first German-language opera house at Hamburg, Bononcini's Xerse (1694), and Handel's Serse (1738).

Abydos became the capital of the eighth Upper Egyptian nome during the Old Kingdom and also became the administrative seat of Upper Egypt from the Fifth Dynasty onward. The tombs at Umm al-Ga’ab were not as monumental as the later pyramids, but they were impressively large for their time and embodied several basic religious beliefs that were to shape the history of ancient Egypt. Like many important Egyptian archaeological sites, the Temple of Osiris-Khentamentyu and the adjoining town of Kom al-Sultan did not undergo thorough archaeological research until the beginning of the twentieth century.

This chapter explores pirates, and pirate colonies, as imagined by Lord Byron and William Hone. The fictional pirates of these texts, like the pirates of A General History, are deeply implicated in the power structures that historical pirates tended to operate outside of: Byron’s and Hone’s pirates are tied to the nation, to the military, to religion, and to a sense of territory more generally. Reading The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos with the perspective of Hone and Don Juan in mind, this chapter argues that depictions of this particular kind of piratical failure function as a diagnosis of the imperial forces that threaten utopian imaginations, while Don Juan proposes a kind of spatial imagination that escapes rather than reinforces imperialism.

This chapter presents a conspectus of Egyptian prehistory and history down to the Roman Period. It emphasizes that the evolution of proto-Egyptian society and civilization developed with increasing momentum during the Prehistoric Period until the latter half of the fourth millennium, when it took a major leap forward under the influence of three major conurbations: first Naqada, whose culture swept all before it to dominate the entire country; then Hierakonpolis, which played a critical role in developing the ideology of Egyptian kingship; and finally Abydos which, in association with Hierakonpolis, laid the foundations for the Pharaonic Egyptian state.

This chapter challenges the theory of the democratization of the afterlife, according to which privileges that were restricted to royalty in the Old Kingdom, like association with Osiris, were usurped by and extended to non-royalty in the political turmoil of the First Intermediate Period. It also investigates the relationship between Osiris and the dead in the Coffin Texts and other sources contemporary with them, and the rise in importance of Abydos as a venue where the deceased could interact with the living as members of that god’s following during the Middle Kingdom. Relationships between the deceased and other deities like Re and Hathor are examined as well. The chapter concludes by exploring the means through which the Egyptians of this time hoped to join the following of Osiris. Particular attention is given to the increased importance of justification as a prerequisite for doing so.

This chapter investigates how and when belief in Osiris and the Osirian afterlife came to an end in Egypt. Four different places are employed as case studies to examine this problem: the Akhmim region, Philae, Abydos, and Thebes. The chapter also seeks to relate the end of belief in the Osirian afterlife to the end of belief in traditional Egyptian religion as a whole. Two different models for the latter are assessed. These may be called the conflict and triumph model and the gradual disappearance model. The evidence of our four case studies speaks unambiguously in favour of the second of these two models.