Osiris

Murdered king of Egypt, lord of the dead and of the grain

The god of the dead and of the life that returns: king of Egypt in the age of the gods, murdered by his brother Seth, made whole by his wife Isis and raised to rule the underworld, where every Egyptian hoped to follow him. His story, told entire only by Plutarch but present in the Pyramid Texts from about 2350 BC, made him the pattern of the dead king and then of every dead person: the mummy with green skin, the crook and the flail, the judge before whom the heart is weighed. His tomb was shown at Abydos, where pilgrims left offerings for two thousand years, and the sprouting grain was his body coming back to life.

Family

Parents

Geb Pyramid Texts

the earth; Osiris inherited his throne over Egypt
Nut Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

the sky; born on the first of the five days added to the year, says Plutarch

Consort

Isis Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

his sister and wife, who found his body and made it whole

Siblings

Seth Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

his brother and murderer
Nephthys Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

his sister and Seth's wife; she mourned him with Isis and, says Plutarch, bore him Anubis
Horus the Elder Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

born on the second of the five days; some said from Osiris and Isis while still in the womb

Children

Horus Pyramid Texts; Great Hymn to Osiris

conceived by Isis from his dead body; his avenger and heir
Anubis Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

by Nephthys; raised by Isis; the embalmer of his body

His stories

King of Egypt

In the Egyptian line of divine kings Osiris took the throne of Egypt from his father Geb, after Ra and Shu. Plutarch says he taught the Egyptians to farm, gave them laws and the worship of the gods, and went out to civilise the world with music and persuasion rather than arms, leaving Isis to govern.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 13; Diodorus, I, 14–20, with a fuller version; the Turin king list also sets him among the gods who reigned before the pharaohs

The chest

Seth measured his brother's body in secret and had a beautiful chest made to fit it. At a banquet he promised it to whoever could lie inside; when Osiris tried, seventy-two conspirators slammed the lid, sealed it with lead and threw it into the Nile, which carried it out to sea. It was the seventeenth day of the month Athyr, in the twenty-eighth year of his reign.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 13; the Egyptian texts say only that he was struck down by Seth at Nedyt, near Abydos, and fell into the water

Byblos

The chest came ashore at Byblos, where a tree grew around it; the king cut the tree for a pillar of his palace. Isis came in mourning, nursed the queen's child and was given the pillar; she took out the chest and brought the body home to the marshes.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 15–16; no Egyptian source knows Byblos

Fourteen pieces

Hunting by moonlight, Seth found the body, cut it into fourteen pieces and scattered them across Egypt. Isis searched them out in a papyrus boat and buried each where she found it, which is why so many towns claim his tomb; only the phallus she could not recover, for the fish had eaten it, and she made a likeness in its place.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 18; the late temple lists count sixteen or forty-two relics, one for each nome

The first mummy

Isis and Nephthys, as two kites, gathered the body; Anubis wrapped it in linen and Thoth said the spells; Isis fanned breath into him with her wings and conceived Horus from the dead god. Osiris did not return to the living. He went down to rule the Duat, and Horus stayed to avenge him.

Great Hymn to Osiris, stela of Amenmose (Louvre C 286), Eighteenth Dynasty; Pyramid Texts, §§ 632–633

The dead king

From Abydos to every coffin

Osiris is first named in officials' offering prayers of the mid-Fifth Dynasty and first spoken of at length in the Pyramid Texts, carved inside the pyramids of the late Fifth and Sixth Dynasties from about 2350 BC; by then his story is already assumed: struck down by his brother, found lying on the bank at Nedyt, mourned by his sisters, raised up by his son. The texts do not tell it; they use it. The dead king is addressed as “Osiris Unas”, and everything done for the god is done for him: he is washed, his bones are gathered, his mouth is opened, and Horus sets him on his throne.

That is what Osiris was for. Egypt had many gods of the sky and few of the dead, and Osiris was the one who had died and come through. In the Old Kingdom the pattern belonged to the king alone; in the Middle Kingdom it spread down the ranks, and by the New Kingdom anyone who could afford a coffin was “the Osiris so-and-so” in the inscriptions, the name a title of the justified dead. The god is drawn accordingly: a mummy in white wrappings, hands crossed on the chest holding a king's crook and flail, face green like young grain or black like Nile silt, and on his head the tall white crown of Upper Egypt between two ostrich plumes.

The judge

The hall of the two truths

From the Middle Kingdom the dead had to be judged before they could join him. The Book of the Dead, spell 125, shows the scene. Anubis leads the dead man into the Hall of the Two Truths, or of Justice, where forty-two assessors sit and Osiris presides on his throne under a canopy, with Isis and Nephthys behind him. The heart is set on one pan of a balance and the feather of Maat, truth, on the other; Thoth records the result, and the Devourer, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, waits for a heart that is heavy. Those who pass are declared “true of voice” and go to the Field of Reeds, where the grain grows tall and the dead reap it.

Hail to you, great god, Lord of Justice! I have come to you, my lord, that you may bring me so that I may see your beauty, for I know you and I know your name …

— Book of the Dead, spell 125, tr. Faulkner

The declaration that follows, that the speaker has not killed, not stolen, not held back the water in its season, not been deaf to words of truth, is the nearest thing Egypt left to a moral code, and it was said to Osiris.

The grain and the flood

Abydos, Khoiak and the corn mummy

Osiris is also what comes back. He was tied to the Nile flood, which returned each summer as he did, and to the grain that is cut down, buried and sprouts. In the month of Khoiak, when the flood had gone down and sowing began, his death and restoration were acted out. At Abydos, where the tomb of the First Dynasty king Djer was pointed out as his from the Middle Kingdom on, his image was carried out in procession, his enemies beaten back in a mock battle at Nedyt and the god brought home to his temple; Ikhernofret, an official of Senwosret III, describes his part in it on a stela of about 1850 BC. In the temples, priests moulded figures of Osiris from earth and barley and watered them until they sprouted; a corn Osiris of this kind lay in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and at the festival's end the djed pillar, his backbone, was hauled upright to show that he stood again.

The story also travelled. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, saw in Osiris his own Dionysus, a god who was torn apart; under the Ptolemies he was joined with the Apis bull of Memphis as Serapis, whose temple at Alexandria was among the great sanctuaries of the Greek world. Plutarch, early in the second century AD, put the whole myth into Greek for a priestess of Delphi, and it is in his version, not in any Egyptian text, that the story survives from beginning to end.