Although Abydos was the burial place of Egypt’s earliest pharaohs, and a place of worship and pilgrimage for the cult of Osiris, the chief god of the Underworld, it is most famous to modern visitors for the splendidly decorated temples of pharaohs Seti I and his son Ramesses II, “the Great.”  Much less well known however is the fact that Abydos also preserves the last royal pyramid complex ever built in Egypt: the monuments built by King Ahmose (1550-1525 BCE) and his powerful sister-wife Queen Ahmose-Nefertary, the founding rulers of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty.  Ahmose’s use of earlier traditions in architecture, along with innovations in decoration and design, set the stage for a new, dynamic ritual landscape.  This lecture will particularly examine how the artists, scribes, priests, and architects of the New Kingdom created visionary ways to convey their thinking about the already ancient past.   The rich archaeological heritage of Abydos, much of it only discovered in recent decades, enables us to follow in the footsteps of ancient individuals negotiating this ancient landscape and connecting themselves to earlier traditions and periods.