Overview
Dorothy Louise Eady was born in London in 1904. At three she fell down a flight of stairs and was thought to be dead, but was soon found playing unharmed. Afterwards she dreamed of a building with columns and a garden and asked to be taken ‘home’. At about seven she saw a photograph of the temple of Seti I at Abydos in Egypt and said it was the building in her dreams; at the British Museum she is said to have kissed the feet of Egyptian statues. As a teenager she studied hieroglyphs.1
She came to believe that she had been Bentreshyt, a young priestess at Abydos who had a love affair with the pharaoh Seti I and took her own life.1
Life in Egypt
In her late twenties she married an Egyptian and moved to Egypt, where she worked for the Department of Antiquities alongside leading Egyptologists. In 1956 she settled at Abydos, took the name Omm Sety (‘mother of Seti’) and lived there until her death in 1981, becoming a well-known figure among visiting scholars. Friends reported that she could find her way around the temple in the dark and point out the site of a garden that excavation later confirmed.12
Assessment
The case was never investigated by a researcher, and almost all of the evidence comes from Eady herself, from friends, and from Jonathan Cott’s biography The Search for Omm Sety (1987).1 Her knowledge of Egyptology was real but could have been learned, and Carl Sagan, among others, regarded fantasy as the simplest explanation. It is included here as one of the most famous claims of a past life, rather than as a documented case.1