Red Hair, Red Land, Red God: The Sethian Threads in a Royal Line
Pharaohs are rarely shown in close companionship with Seth, let alone flanked by him in statuary. Most kings preferred the reassuring embrace of Amun, Ptah, Horus, or Osiris. Yet, the Ramesside kings stand out strikingly. In several monuments; especially at Avaris/Per-Ramesses, Qantir, Sehel, and parts of Abydos, Seth appears alongside them with a sort of proud, almost familial legitimacy.
This is not an accident, nor is it a subversive gesture. It is historical, theological, and deeply personal.
The name Seti (Sethy, Sethos)
The family of Seti I and Ramesses II sprang from the marshy expanses of the eastern Delta, that windswept land around Avaris and Qantir where Seth had been honoured since time immemorial. In those frontier towns, the red god was no villain but a formidable guardian as the storm-lord who kept watch over Egypt’s northern borders and lent his strength to soldiers, charioteers, and all who lived close to the desert’s edge. For a child born of such country, the name “Seti” or “Man of Seth”, was neither strange nor daring; it was a gesture of local pride, a nod to ancestral loyalties, and a quiet proclamation of the family’s deep military identity.
Seti I carried this name long before royalty ever entered the picture. Stelae from the final years of the 18th Dynasty already show him serving in military and administrative posts under Horemheb, firmly established as “Seti” while still a private man. When his father Paramessu ascended the throne as Ramesses I, he did not rename his son for political grandeur; Seti simply retained the name he had always borne, later adopting the throne-name Menmaatre upon becoming king. His devotion to Seth was therefore woven into his life from birth, not shaped by royal necessity.
Paramessu himself hailed from a respected Delta lineage with deep military roots, a family steeped in the cult of Seth of Avaris. To them, naming a son after their patron deity was entirely natural and almost expected. Seth, after all, was the god who guided desert winds, charged into battle with thunderous might, and protected the vulnerable frontier. In the centuries before his later demonisation, Seth’s worship in the Delta was vigorous, esteemed, and far from controversial. To bestow a child with the name “Seti” was not an act of provocation but an affirmation of strength, loyalty, and local identity.
Yet nor was Seti I the earliest evidence of someone to bear such a name. Earlier generations offer several examples: Seti, son of Suty, a high-ranking official in the reigns of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten; other administrators named Seti in Theban and Memphite records; and individuals from the Hyksos era whose names proudly carried Seth’s power. The name was never ubiquitous, but it was known, respected, and firmly attested in precisely the period into which the future king was born. Seti I simply became the most luminous bearer of a much older tradition, carrying the storm-god’s name from the Delta’s reeds to the throne of Egypt.
Seth (Set), the “Devil” of Egyptian Religion?
Modern eyes often look upon Seth with suspicion, imagining him as a sort of Egyptian devil—a wicked figure lurking at the fringes of the pantheon, forever plotting in the shadows. After all, he slew Osiris, clashed with Horus, and ruled over the hot red wastes of the desert: the very image, some think, of ancient villainy. Yet this is a thoroughly modern reading, born from centuries of thinking in binaries: good versus evil, light versus darkness, God versus the Devil. The Egyptians, however, lived in a very different philosophical world, one where divinity was not a matter of moral absolutes but of cosmic forces held in perpetual balance. Their gods were not characters in a heavenly drama but manifestations or living essences of aspects from the natural and spiritual world.
Seth, therefore, was not evil; he was chaos personified. He was the storm that tears across the desert, the unpredictable wind, the cracking thunder, the searing red land that pushed against the fertile Nile. These were dangerous forces, yes, but danger is not the same as wickedness. The Egyptians saw the universe as a delicate interplay between order (Ma’at) and disorder (Isfet), each necessary for the other to exist. Without chaos, order would grow stagnant; without disorder, there would be nothing for the gods (and the king) to conquer and re-establish each dawn. In this sense, Seth is less a fallen angel and more a cosmic counterweight, the turbulent half of a universal yin and yang.
Indeed, in the celestial realm, Seth performs heroic duties. Each night, aboard Ra’s sun-barque, it is Seth who stands at the prow and drives his spear into the monstrous serpent Apophis, ensuring that the sun can rise again. It is Seth who governs the Red Land, the frontier that shields Egypt from foreign invasion. It is Seth who embodies raw might, endurance, the soldier’s courage, and the unyielding will to withstand the desert’s brutality. His storms were feared, but they were also respected, for they signified a power that could be harnessed for protection.
This is why it is so misguided to frown at reliefs in which the king receives the ankh or blessing from Seth, as though he were fraternising with the “bad guy.” To the Egyptians, such a scene was not shocking but perfectly logical. The king was the earthly maintainer of balance, the one person strong enough to hold chaos and order together. Being flanked by Seth did not imply corruption, it proclaimed mastery. It said,
“I stand at the centre of the universe, upholding Ma’at, supported by all divine forces, both gentle and fierce alike.”
For a Ramesside king, raised in the Delta winds and born of a military house, Seth was not a foe but an ally, the very incarnation of strength.
To understand Seth properly is to step out of modern moral frameworks and into the shimmering, symbolic world of the ancient Nile. There, a god could be storm and salvation, chaos and courage, feared and venerated in the same breath. And rather than see him as a villain, we might instead see him as the necessary wildness of the cosmos; the red desert wind that reminds creation to keep its balance.
In the twilight days of the Ramesside house, Seth’s legacy lingered in the names of princes. Two boys of the royal family bore the proud title Sethherkhepshef meaning“Seth Is His Strength”, one a son of Ramesses III, the other a grandson who would briefly rule as Ramesses VIII. They were not the same man, but branches of the same storm-born lineage, carrying the name of the desert god into the last flickering years of Egypt’s empire.
Ostracon of Prince Sethherkhepshef
Red Hair
There is also the matter of red hair, a detail that modern readers find irresistibly tantalising, and with good reason. In Ancient Egyptian symbolism, the colour red (desher) was intimately tied to Seth: the red sands of the desert, the red storm-winds, the red-skinned foreigners who threatened Egypt’s borders. It was the colour of danger, wildness, and untamed force, and in artistic convention anything marked in red belonged, in some measure, to Seth’s realm. Although the Egyptians never established an official doctrine linking red hair to the god, the association between fiery colouring and Sethian energy lingered quietly in the cultural imagination.
This makes the Ramesside mummies especially intriguing, as when the mummy of Ramesses II (son of Seti I) mummy was examined in France in the 1970s, analyses showed that the hair retained its natural red tone, not merely henna staining or post-mortem alteration; a genuine coppery colour preserved across millennia.
We need not claim that such colouring inspired the family’s devotion to Seth, yet in a culture that delighted in symbolic correspondences, the echo would not have gone unnoticed. A child with fiery hair, born of a Delta lineage devoted to the storm-god, would have seemed touched, if just ever so slightly, by Seth’s own desert flame.
The Cult of Seth at Sepermeru
In the dusty stretch of Upper Egypt, between the calmer fields of Heracleopolis and the ancient walls of Oxyrhynchus, there once stood a town the Egyptians called Sepermeru, a place where the desert breathed a little louder, and the wind carried the name of one god above all others. Here, in the XIX Nome, Seth the Lord of the Red Land was worshipped not as villain or exile, but as master, protector, and rightful lord of the frontier.
Sepermeru was no quiet village; it was a temple-town, a living sanctuary built around the sprawling enclosure of “Seth, Lord of Sepermeru.” Within its walls, cultic processions once wound through pylons and courtyards, priests lifted incense toward the desert horizon, and the storm-god’s standard rose like a crimson feather against the sky. This was a world where Seth was not the usurper of myth, but a god of strength, of dangerous majesty, the one who guarded Egypt’s edges and drove back the forces beyond.
Nestled within the greater temple precinct stood another house, smaller yet newly radiant in the Ramesside age: the Temple of Nephthys of Ramesses-Meriamun. She, the quiet sister of Isis, goddess of the twilight boundary, shared her sacred space with her ancient consort. Stone by stone, Ramesses II restored her presence here, perhaps sensing that a god of storms should not stand alone. Together, Seth and Nephthys ruled this desert sanctuary, the storm and the shadow, guardians of the threshold between worlds.
Life at Sepermeru pulsed with sacred bureaucracy. The Wilbour Papyrus records its priests, prophets, landholdings, irrigation canals, and fields stretching into the desert like tributaries of devotion. The Prophet Huy served as administrator of Seth’s household, while Nephthys’ lands fell under the care of her own priests, Merybarse and Penpmer. Each field and orchard, each vineyard and granary, fed not merely the stomach of the town but the pulse of its divine worship. Sepermeru was both a temple and a livelihood, a shining testament to the god who mastered the untamed.
Even after Seth’s cult waned in the late 20th Dynasty, and Sepermeru fell into silence, the god’s name still echoed in distant places. As late as Ptolemaic times, an inscription at Edfu remembers “Seth of Sepermeru”, though with a sorrowful note that his canals had dried, his once-living waters stilled. But even this lament is a kind of honour: for the Egyptians remembered him still, the god who had once ruled that desert town, fierce and magnificent.
Today, Sepermeru lies quiet beneath the dust. But if you close your eyes, you may almost hear it: the clatter of priests in white linen, the whisper of incense rising to the dusk, the call of Nephthys at twilight, and beyond it all, the deep, desert-rolling breath of Seth, storm-lord, frontier-god, and ancient master of a place where the sand still remembers his name.
Ramesses III
Ramesses III was not the grandson of Ramesses the Great, but he was certainly a member of the same storm-born Delta clan. When the main Ramesside line faltered, a collateral branch stepped forward, carrying the old family blood and its devotion to the gods into a new dynasty. Thus, the brilliance of Seti and the red-haired legacy of Ramesses II found an echo in Ramesses III, the king who revived their glory in the twilight of empire.
In this rare granite triad, Ramesses III stands life-size between two divine rivals: falcon-headed Horus and the enigmatic Seth. All three stride forward with the left leg advanced, carved fully in the round, their forms almost equal in height, sharing a single block like a frozen ceremony. The king wears the tall White Crown of Upper Egypt, a broad usekh collar, and a finely pleated shendyt kilt, grasping the ankh of life in one hand and a rolled sceptre or document of power in the other. On either side, Horus and Seth mirror one another, each resting a protective hand upon the royal crown while holding the ankh, as if jointly officiating at the king’s coronation.
As mentioned previously, to modern viewers, seeing Seth in such intimate attendance can be surprising, but to an Egyptian of his time this scene proclaimed balance rather than blasphemy. Horus embodies the ordered kingship of the fertile Nile valley; Seth personifies the raw force of the desert and foreign lands. Together they acknowledge Ramesses III as lord of both Black Land and Red, guardian of harmony at the point where their powers meet. As one of the very few surviving statues to show these two gods acting in concert over a living king, this triad stands as a stone manifesto of Ramesside theology: even the storm-god of chaos, when properly mastered, could be made to uphold royal order.
