The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

We have, however, one or two facts to guide us in determining the primitive character of the god. He was a mummified man like Ptaḥ of Memphis, and he was the brother and enemy of Set. Set or Sut became for the later Egyptians the impersonation of evil. He was identified with Apophis, the serpent of wickedness, against whom the sun-god wages perpetual war; and his name was erased from the monuments on which it was engraved. But all this was because Set was the god and the representative of the Asiatic invaders who had conquered Egypt, and aroused in the Egyptian mind a feeling of bitter animosity towards themselves. As late as the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the Pharaohs who restored Tanis, the Hyksos capital, to something of its former glory, called themselves after the name of the Hyksos deity. Thothmes iii. of the Eighteenth Dynasty built a temple in honour of Set of Ombos, who was worshipped near Dendera; and if we go back to the oldest records of the united monarchy, we find Set symbolising the north while Horus symbolises the south. Before the days of Menes, Set was the god of Northern Egypt, Horus of Southern Egypt. In the prehistoric [pg 163] wars of the two kingdoms the two gods would be hostile to one another, and yet brethren.

It was the armies of Set that were driven by Horus and his metal-bearing followers from one end of Egypt to the other, and finally overcome.[136] Set therefore represents in the legend the older population of the valley of the Nile. The reason of this is not far to seek. Set or Sut, like Sati, denotes the Semitic or African nomad of the desert, the Babylonian Sutu. He is the equivalent of the Bedâwi of to-day, who still hovers on the Egyptian borders, and between whom and the fellah there is perpetual feud. The same cause which made Horus the brother and yet the enemy of Set must have been at work to place Osiris in the same relation to him. Osiris too must have typified the Pharaonic Egyptian, and like Horus have been the first of the Pharaohs. Hence his human body, and hence also the confusion between himself and Horus, which ended in making Horus his son and in generating a new Horus—Horus the younger—by the side of the older Horus of the Egyptian faith.[137]

The position of Osiris in respect to Anher is now clear. He is the sun-god after his setting in the west, when he has passed to the region of the dead in the underworld. He stands, therefore, in exactly the same relation to Anher that the mummified hawk stands to the Horus-hawk. The one belongs to the city of the living, the other to the city of the dead. But they are both the same deity under different forms, one of which presides over the city, the other over its burying-ground. Like Horus, Osiris must have been a sun-god of the [pg 164] Pharaonic Egyptians, but a sun-god who was connected for some special reason with the dead.[138]

Now Mr. Ball has drawn attention to the fact that there was a Sumerian god who had precisely the same name as Osiris, and that this name is expressed in both cases by precisely the same ideographs.[139] The etymology of the name has been sought in vain in Egyptian. But the cuneiform texts make it clear. Osiris (As-ar) is the Asari of ancient Babylonia, who was called Merodach by the Semites, and whose ordinary title is “the god who does good to man.” The name of Asari is written with two ideographs, one of which denotes “a place” and the other “an eye,” and the forms of the two ideographs, as well as their meanings, are identical with those of the hieroglyphic characters which represent Osiris. Such a threefold agreement cannot be accidental: both the name and the mode of writing it must have come from Babylonia. And what makes the agreement the stronger is the fact that the ideographs have nothing to do with the signification of the name itself; they express simply its pronunciation. In the Sumerian of early Babylonia the name signified “the mighty one.”[140]

Asari was the sun-god of Eridu, the ancient seaport of Babylonia on the Persian Gulf. He was the son of Ea, the chief god of the city, of whose will and wisdom he was the interpreter. It was he who communicated to men the lessons in culture and the art of healing, which [pg 165] Ea was willing they should learn. Just as Osiris spent his life in doing good, according to the Egyptian legend, so Asari was he “who does good to man.” He was ever on the watch to help his worshippers, to convey to them the magic formulas which could ward off sickness or evil, and, as it is often expressed, to “raise the dead to life.”

In this last expression we have the key to the part played by Osiris. Osiris died, and was buried, like Asari or Merodach, whose temple at Babylon was also his tomb; but it was that he might rise again in the morning with renewed strength and brilliancy. And through the spells he had received from his father all those who trusted in him, and shared in his death and entombment, were also “raised to life.” Both in Egypt and in Babylonia he was the god of the resurrection, whether that took place in this visible world or in the heavenly paradise, which was a purified reflection of the earth.

In Babylonia, Asari or Merodach was the champion of light and order, who conquered the dragon of chaos and her anarchic forces, and put the demons of darkness to flight. In Egypt that part was taken by Horus. But both Anher and Osiris were merely local forms—local names, if the phrase should be preferred—of Horus and the mummified hawk. Anher is sometimes represented, like Horus, with the spear in his hand, overthrowing the wicked; but his figure was eclipsed by that of Osiris, who had come to be regarded as the benefactor of mankind, and to whom men prayed in sickness and death. A god of the dead, however, could not be a conqueror; it was he, and not his foe, who had died, and consequently the victories gained by Horus could not be ascribed to him. But the difficulty was not insoluble; Horus became his son, who was at the same time his father, [pg 166] and the old struggle between Horus and Set was transferred to the Osirian cult.

It is significant, however, that in the recently-recovered monuments of the Thinite dynasties Set is still the twin-brother of Horus. He still represents the north, until lately the antagonist of the south; and a king whose remains have been found at Nekhen and Abydos, and who calls himself “the uniter of the two sceptres” of Egypt, still sets the Horus-hawk and the animal of Set above his name.

Set, as I have already said, is the Sutu or Bedâwi. He was adored elsewhere than in Egypt; the Moabites called themselves his children (Num. xxiv. 17), and in the cuneiform texts Sutu-sar (“Sutu the king”) and Nabu-rabê (“Nebo the great”) are described as twins.[141] But in Egypt he represented the population which had been conquered by the Pharaonic Egyptians or continued to live on the desert frontiers of the country, and which was stronger in the Delta than in the south. The old struggle, therefore, between light and darkness, order and confusion, which formed the background of Babylonian mythology, became the struggle which was waged for such long centuries, first between the Pharaonic Egyptians and the neolithic races, then between the kingdoms of the south and north, and finally between the united monarchy and the Bedâwin of the desert or assailants from Asia. Where the foreign element prevailed, Set was an honoured god; where the ruling Egyptian was dominant, his place was taken by his brother and his antagonist.

It has been thought that the struggle between Horus and Set typified the struggle that is ever going on [pg 167] between the desert and the cultivated land. But such an idea is far too abstract to have formed the basis of an Egyptian religious myth. It might have been elaborated subsequently by some theological school out of the contrast between the Sutu of the desert and the god of the agriculturists; but it could never have been there originally. The interpretation is as little justifiable as that which sees in Osiris the seed that is buried in the ground.