The Osiris myth is the most elaborate and influential story in ancient Egyptian mythology. It concerns the murder of the god Osiris, a primeval king of Egypt, and its consequences. Osiris's murderer, his brother Set, usurps his throne. Meanwhile, Osiris's wife Isis restores her husband's body, allowing him to posthumously beget their son, Horus. The remainder of the story focuses on Horus, the product of the union of Isis and Osiris, who is at first a vulnerable child protected by his mother and then becomes Set's rival for the throne. Their often violent conflict ends with Horus's triumph, which restores maat (cosmic and social order) to Egypt after Set's unrighteous reign and completes the process of Osiris's resurrection.
The myth, with its complex symbolism, is integral to ancient Egyptian conceptions of kingship and succession, conflict between order and disorder, and especially death and the afterlife. It also expresses the essential character of each of the four deities at its center, and many elements of their worship in ancient Egyptian religion were derived from the myth.
The Osiris myth reached its basic form in or before the 24th century BCE. Many of its elements originated in religious ideas, but the struggle between Horus and Set may have been partly inspired by a regional conflict in Predynastic or Early Dynastic times. Scholars have tried to discern the exact nature of the events that gave rise to the story, but they have reached no definitive conclusions.
Parts of the myth appear in a wide variety of Egyptian texts, from funerary texts and magical spells to short stories. The story is, therefore, more detailed and more cohesive than any other ancient Egyptian myth. Yet no Egyptian source gives a full account of the myth, and the sources vary widely in their versions of events. Greek and Roman writings, particularly On Isis and Osiris by Plutarch, provide more information but may not always accurately reflect Egyptian beliefs. Through these writings, the Osiris myth persisted after knowledge of most ancient Egyptian beliefs was lost, and it is still well known today.
Sources The myth of Osiris was deeply influential in ancient Egyptian religion and was popular among ordinary people. One reason for this popularity is the myth's primary religious meaning, which implies that any dead person can reach a pleasant afterlife. Another reason is that the characters and their emotions are more reminiscent of the lives of real people than those in most Egyptian myths, making the story more appealing to the general populace. In particular, the myth conveys a "strong sense of family loyalty and devotion", as the Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths puts it, in the relationships between Osiris, Isis, and Horus.
With this widespread appeal, the myth appears in more ancient texts than any other myth and in an exceptionally broad range of Egyptian literary styles. These sources also provide an unusual amount of detail. Ancient Egyptian myths are fragmentary and vague; the religious metaphors contained within the myths were more important than coherent narration. Each text that contains a myth, or a fragment of one, may adapt the myth to suit its particular purposes, so different texts can contain contradictory versions of events. Because the Osiris myth was used in such a variety of ways, versions often conflict with each other. Nevertheless, the fragmentary versions, taken together, give it a greater resemblance to a cohesive story than most Egyptian myths.
Though Osiris appears earlier in private tombs, the earliest mentions of the Osiris myth are in the Pyramid Texts, the first Egyptian funerary texts, which appeared on the walls of burial chambers in pyramids at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, during the 24th century BCE. These texts, made up of disparate spells or "utterances", contain ideas that are presumed to date from still earlier times. The texts are concerned with the afterlife of the king buried in the pyramid, so they frequently refer to the Osiris myth, which is deeply involved with kingship and the afterlife. Major elements of the story, such as the death and restoration of Osiris and the strife between Horus and Set, appear in the utterances of the Pyramid Texts. Funerary texts written in later times, such as the Coffin Texts from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BCE) and the Book of the Dead from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BCE), also contain elements of the myth.
Other types of religious texts give evidence for the myth, such as two Middle Kingdom texts: the Dramatic Ramesseum Papyrus and the Ikhernofret Stela. The papyrus describes the coronation of Senusret I, whereas the stela alludes to events in the annual festival of Khoiak. Rituals in both these festivals reenacted elements of the Osiris myth. The most complete ancient Egyptian account of the myth is the Great Hymn to Osiris, an inscription from the Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1550–1292 BCE) that gives the general outline of the entire story but includes little detail. Another important source is the Memphite Theology, a religious narrative that includes an account of Osiris's death as well as the resolution of the dispute between Horus and Set. This narrative associates the kingship that Osiris and Horus represent with Ptah, the creator deity of Memphis. The text was long thought to date back to the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BCE) and was treated as a source for information about the early stages in the development of the myth. Since the 1970s, however, Egyptologists have concluded that the text dates to the New Kingdom at the earliest.
Rituals in honor of Osiris are another major source of information. Some of these texts are found on the walls of temples that date from the New Kingdom, the Ptolemaic era (323–30 BCE), or the Roman era (30 BCE to the fourth century CE). Some of these late ritual texts, in which Isis and Nephthys lament their brother's death, were adapted into funerary texts. In these texts, the goddesses' pleas were meant to rouse Osiris—and thus the deceased person—to live again.
Magical healing spells, which were used by Egyptians of all classes, are the source for an important portion of the myth, in which Horus is poisoned or otherwise sickened, and Isis heals him. The spells identify a sick person with Horus so that he or she can benefit from the goddess's efforts. The spells are known from papyrus copies, which serve as instructions for healing rituals, and from a specialized type of inscribed stone stela called a cippus. People seeking healing poured water over these cippi, an act that was believed to imbue the water with the healing power contained in the text, and then drank the water in hope of curing their ailments. The theme of an endangered child protected by magic also appears on inscribed ritual wands from the Middle Kingdom, which were made centuries before the more detailed healing spells that specifically connect this theme with the Osiris myth.
Episodes from the myth were also recorded in writings that may have been intended as entertainment. Prominent among these texts is "The Contendings of Horus and Set", a humorous retelling of several episodes of the struggle between the two deities, which dates to the Twentieth Dynasty (c. 1190–1070 BCE). It vividly characterizes the deities involved; as the Egyptologist Donald B. Redford says, "Horus appears as a physically weak but clever Puck-like figure, Seth [Set] as a strong-man buffoon of limited intelligence, Re-Horakhty [Ra] as a prejudiced, sulky judge, and Osiris as an articulate curmudgeon with an acid tongue." Despite its atypical nature, "Contendings" includes many of the oldest episodes in the divine conflict, and many events appear in the same order as in much later accounts, suggesting that a traditional sequence of events was forming at the time that the story was written.
Ancient Greek and Roman writers, who described Egyptian religion late in its history, recorded much of the Osiris myth. Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, mentioned parts of the myth in his description of Egypt in the Histories, and four centuries later, Diodorus Siculus provided a summary of the myth in his Bibliotheca historica. In the early 2nd century CE, Plutarch wrote the most complete ancient account of the myth in On Isis and Osiris, an analysis of Egyptian religious beliefs. Plutarch's account of the myth is the version that modern popular writings most frequently retell. The writings of these classical authors may give a distorted view of Egyptian beliefs. For instance, On Isis and Osiris includes many interpretations of Egyptian belief that are influenced by various Greek philosophies, and its account of the myth contains portions with no known parallel in Egyptian tradition. Griffiths concluded that several elements of this account were taken from Greek mythology, and that the work as a whole was not based directly on Egyptian sources. His colleague John Baines, on the other hand, says that temples may have kept written accounts of myths that were later lost, and that Plutarch could have drawn on such sources to write his narrative.
Synopsis Death and resurrection of Osiris At the start of the story, Osiris rules Egypt, having inherited the kingship from his ancestors in a lineage stretching back to the creator of the world, Ra or Atum. His queen is Isis, who, along with Osiris and his murderer, Set, are the children of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut. Little information about the reign of Osiris appears in Egyptian sources; the focus is on his death and the events that follow. Osiris is connected with life-giving power, righteous kingship, and the rule of maat, the ideal natural order whose maintenance was a fundamental goal in ancient Egyptian culture. Set is closely associated with violence and chaos. Therefore, the slaying of Osiris symbolizes the struggle between order and disorder, and the disruption of life by death.
Some versions of the myth provide Set's motive for killing Osiris. According to a spell in the Pyramid Texts, Set is taking revenge for a kick Osiris gave him, whereas in a Late Period text, Set's grievance is that Osiris had sex with Nephthys, who is Set's consort and the fourth child of Geb and Nut. The murder itself is frequently alluded to, but never clearly described. The Egyptians believed that written words had the power to affect reality, so they avoided writing directly about profoundly negative events such as Osiris's death. Sometimes they denied his death altogether, even though the bulk of the traditions about him make it clear that he has been murdered. In some cases the texts suggest that Set takes the form of a wild animal, such as a crocodile or bull, to slay Osiris; in others they imply that Osiris's corpse is thrown in the water or that he is drowned. This latter tradition is the origin of the Egyptian belief that people who had drowned in the Nile were sacred. Even the identity of the victim can vary, as it is sometimes the god Haroeris, an elder form of Horus, who is murdered by Set and then avenged by another form of Horus, who is Haroeris's son by Isis.
By the end of the New Kingdom, a tradition had developed that Set had cut Osiris's body into pieces and scattered them across Egypt. Cult centers of Osiris all over the country claimed that the corpse, or particular pieces of it, were found near them. The dismembered parts could be said to number as many as 42, each piece being equated with one of the 42 nomes, or provinces, in Egypt. Thus the god of kingship becomes the embodiment of his kingdom.