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Seti 1 - The Headless Mummy.Well ... Seti 1 did not really have a missing head when his tomb was discovered in 1817 by Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Belzoni, but it was not joined to his body. His body was well preserved and his long dead face is almost lifelike after thousands of years in the grave. His tomb also survived the centuries in sparkling condition and shows off the grandeur of an Egyptian royal burial chamber. It is a whopping 120 metres long with decorations adorning every passageway and an intricately decorated sarcophagus that held a fine example of Ancient Egyptian mummification. So, no expense was spared on this historically important pharaoh. Although he was the father of Ramesses the second, he did not live a long life like his son. He had yet to reach his forties before he died. Disease seems to be a likely cause.
*He was about 5 feet seven inches tall. Small in stature but large in life. *He was discovered decapitated (possibly by tomb robbers) *His heart was placed on the right side of his body, which raises some interesting questions: Was this a freak natural occurrence? Was it a mistake by embalmers who usually placed the heart on the left? Was it a bizarre suggestion that his heart would work better on the right side in afterlife than it did on the left when he was alive?
He was a background figure in the movie The Mummy, released in 1999. In the movie, one of his priests (Imhotep) has an affair with his mistress. The Pharaoh's guards hunt down the fleeing priest, wrap him in bandages with flesh eating scarabs, and subject him to a curse whereby he will suffer his wounds for an eternity. He is also a background figure as the father of Ramesses the second in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments. This film centres around the idea that Seti 1 was an adoptive father to Moses and his favoured son, Ramesses, was the pharaoh that Moses pleaded with to "let his people go."
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