When she finally stopped working in 1969, she stayed in the poor village of Araba el-Madfuna near Abydos, where she had lived for many years and where archaeologists and tourists knew her. She lived in mud-brick peasant homes with cats, donkeys, and pet vipers because her small pension of about $30 a month wasn’t enough to support her.
She substituted most of her diet with mint tea, holy water, dog vitamins, and prayer. She made extra money by selling needlepoint pictures of Egyptian gods, scenes from the temple of Abydos, and hieroglyphic cartouches to tourists. Eady used to call her small mud-brick home the “Omm Sety Hilton.”
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She lived just a short walk from the temple and spent many hours there in her later years, telling tourists about its beauty and sharing her vast knowledge with archaeologists who came to visit. One of them, James P. Allen of the American Research Center in Cairo, called her the patron saint of Egyptology and said, “I don’t know of any American archaeologist in Egypt who doesn’t respect her.”
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Dorothy’s health started to get worse in her last years. She had a heart attack, a broken knee, phlebitis, dysentery, and several other illnesses. She was thin and weak but determined to die at Abydos. She reflected on her strange life and said, “It’s been more than worth it. I wouldn’t want to change anything.”
Dorothy turned down her son Sety’s offer to live with him and his eight kids in Kuwait, where he was working at the time. She told him that she had lived next to Abydos for more than 20 years and was determined to die and be buried there. Dorothy Eady died on April 21, 1981, in the village next to Abydos, a sacred city with many temples.
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In accordance with ancient Egyptian tradition, Dorothy’s tomb on the western side of her garden had its head carved as a figure of Isis with her wings spread out. Eady was sure that when she died, her spirit would go through the Gate to the West and meet up with her friends from life. In the Pyramid Texts, written thousands of years ago, this new life was described as “sleeping that she may wake, dying that she may live.”
Dorothy Eady kept her diaries for the rest of her life and wrote many books about Egyptian history and her past lives- Abydos: the Holy City of Ancient Egypt, Omm Sety’s Abydos, and Omm Sety’s Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times are some of the most important.
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