God

Horus

Falcon of the sky, son of Osiris, the god every king was

The falcon-god of the sky, whose right eye is the sun and left eye the moon, and the god with whom the king of Egypt was identified from the first dynasty to the last. There are several of him: Horus the Elder, brother of Osiris; Horus of Edfu, the winged disc; Horus son of Isis, the child hidden in the marshes who grows up to fight his uncle Seth for his father's throne. The trial and the fights, told with relish in a papyrus of about 1150 BC, end with Horus crowned and Egypt united, and every coronation repeated the result. His eye, torn out by Seth and restored, became the wedjat amulet, the most common in Egypt.

Domain: Sky, kingship, protection; the living king was Horus; the dead one, Osiris
Symbols: Falcon, wedjat eye, winged sun disc, double crown; the falcon on the serekh is the king's oldest title
Cult centres: Nekhen and Edfu; Hierakonpolis, the “falcon city”, from Predynastic times; the Ptolemaic temple at Edfu, 237–57 BC, is the best preserved in Egypt
Egyptian name: Heru; “the distant one”, “the one on high”; Horus is the Greek form
Greek match: Apollo; so Herodotus (II, 144); the child Horus became Harpocrates
Parents: Osiris and Isis; conceived from the dead Osiris, hidden at Chemmis

Family

Parents

Osiris Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

the murdered king, whom he avenged and succeeded
Isis Pyramid Texts; Great Hymn to Osiris

conceived him from the dead god and reared him in the marshes
Nut and Ra Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

the parents of Horus the Elder, born on the second of the five days: an older Horus, brother of Osiris

Consort

Hathor Temples of Edfu and Dendera

her name means “house of Horus”; Hathor of Dendera sailed to Edfu each year for the Feast of the Beautiful Reunion

Rival

Seth Pyramid Texts; The Contendings of Horus and Seth

his uncle; eighty years of trial and combat before the Ennead

Children

Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, Qebehsenuef Pyramid Texts; Book of the Dead

the four sons of Horus, guardians of the embalmed organs in the canopic jars
Ihy Temple of Dendera

of Hathor; the child who shakes the sistrum

Joined with

Ra Pyramid Texts

as Ra-Horakhty, the sun on the horizon

His stories

1
The child at Chemmis

Isis bore him in secret in the papyrus marshes of Chemmis and hid him from Seth, who was looking for the heir. He was stung by a scorpion, sick with fever and near death more than once; Isis, Thoth and the gods of the marsh healed him each time, and he grew to manhood in hiding.

Metternich Stela (Thirtieth Dynasty) and the other cippi of Horus, healing stelae that show him as a boy standing on crocodiles
2
The trial before the Ennead

Grown, Horus claimed his father's office before the Ennead, with Ra-Horakhty presiding. The gods favoured him, but Ra preferred Seth, the stronger, and the case dragged on for eighty years; a letter went to Neith, who ruled for Horus, and Isis, barred from the court, tricked Seth into condemning himself.

The Contendings of Horus and Seth, Papyrus Chester Beatty I, written under Ramesses V (about 1150 BC)
3
The contests

Seth challenged Horus to spend three months under water as hippopotami; Isis, trying to harpoon Seth, struck her son first, then let her brother go, and Horus cut off her head in fury. Seth tore out Horus's eyes and buried them; Hathor healed them with gazelle's milk. Last came a race in stone boats: Horus built his of pine plastered to look like stone, Seth's real stone boat sank, and Seth, turned hippopotamus, wrecked his rival's.

The Contendings of Horus and Seth; the episode of the lettuce, in which Seth's attempt to shame Horus is turned back on him by Isis, is in the same text
4
The eye

In the older telling Seth tore out Horus's eye in their fight, and Thoth found it and made it whole. Horus gave the healed eye to his dead father to eat, and Osiris lived by it. The eye, wedjat, “the sound one”, became the word for an offering and the commonest amulet in Egypt.

Pyramid Texts, Utterances 356–357 and many others; the parts of the eye were long read as the fractions of the grain measure
5
The judgement

Osiris wrote from the underworld to remind the gods that he had made the barley and the emmer they lived on, and that his messengers could fetch any heart that did wrong. Seth was brought in chains and gave up his claim, and the white crown was set on Horus's head; Seth was given a place in the sky beside Ra, to thunder.

The Contendings of Horus and Seth, the ending; the Memphite Theology on the Shabaka Stone has Geb divide Egypt between them and then give it all to Horus

The falcon

The sky, the sun and the moon

Horus is older than his story. The falcon was a god at Nekhen, Hierakonpolis, in the far south before Egypt was united, and the Narmer Palette of about 3100 BC already shows him perched over the conquered north, holding a captive by a rope through the nose. His name, Heru, means something like “the one far above”, and the earliest Horus is the sky itself: a great bird whose eyes are the sun and the moon. When the Egyptians said the moon was the eye of Horus, damaged by Seth and made whole by Thoth, they were describing the sky and telling the myth at once.

He is also a sun-god. As Horakhty, “Horus of the two horizons”, he is the sun at its rising, and from the Old Kingdom he was joined to Ra as Ra-Horakhty, the form of the sun-god that presides over the court of the gods. At Edfu he is Horus of Behdet, the winged disc over every temple doorway, driving Seth's crocodiles and hippopotami before him. The Egyptians did not mind the plurality. Horus the Elder, Horus the Child, Horus son of Isis, Horus of Edfu, of Letopolis, of Buto: these were faces of one power, the falcon that watches from a height.

The king

The serekh, the crowns and the Two Lands

From the First Dynasty the king's first and oldest name was written inside a serekh, a frame showing the palace front, with a falcon perched on top: the king was Horus in his palace. Four other names were added over the centuries; this one never left. On the throne the king was the living Horus; in the tomb he became Osiris, and his son was Horus after him. The succession from murdered father to avenging son was the model of every reign, and the coronation was staged as Horus taking possession of the Two Lands, the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt set on his head and the lily and the papyrus tied together beneath his throne.

That is why Horus had to win in court as well as by force. The Memphite Theology, a text of the Late Period claiming to be much older, has Geb, the earth, first divide Egypt between Seth and Horus and then think again and give the whole to Horus, his grandson. One king of the Second Dynasty, Khasekhemwy, set both the falcon and the Seth animal over his name; no one repeated it. The Ptolemies, Greeks, put the old claim on the walls of Edfu, where the priests carved the Triumph of Horus, a drama in which Seth as a hippopotamus is harpooned ten times and the god is crowned.

The fight with Seth

Eighty years before the Ennead

The Pyramid Texts of about 2350 BC know the outline: Seth has torn out the eye of Horus, Horus has torn off the testicles of Seth, and Thoth has judged between them. The full story survives in one manuscript, Papyrus Chester Beatty I, written at Thebes under Ramesses V, and it is not solemn. The gods bicker; Ra sulks in his tent until Hathor cheers him up by showing him her body; Seth, beaten on every point of law, keeps demanding trials of strength, and Isis keeps winning them by trickery. When the case is at last referred to Osiris, he answers from the underworld. In paraphrase: why should his son be defrauded, when it was he who made the gods strong, and made the barley and emmer that feed them and the cattle after them? When Ra waves this aside, a second letter carries the threat: the land of the dead is full of savage messengers who fear no god, and he can send them for the heart of any wrongdoer.

Horus takes the white crown; Seth is given to Ra, to thunder in the sky. The story ends in a coronation, but the Egyptians kept the balance: on the side of every throne the two gods together tie the plants of the Two Lands into one knot. The eye that Seth had damaged and Thoth had healed, the wedjat, “the sound one”, was offered to Osiris to eat and painted on coffins, and in the offering rites every gift to a god could be called the Eye of Horus.

Mentioned in

God Isis Wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, the greatest magician of the gods God Osiris Murdered king of Egypt, lord of the dead and of the grain God Ra The sun-god of Heliopolis, creator and first king of the world

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