Isis weaned them from cannibalism, healed their diseases by means of medicine or of magic, united women to men in legitimate marriage, and showed them how to grind grain between two flat stones and to prepare bread for the household. She invented the loom with the help of her sister Nephthys, and was the first to weave and bleach linen. There was no worship of the gods before Osiris established it, appointed the offerings, regulated the order of ceremonies, and composed the texts and melodies of the liturgies. He built cities, among them Thebes itself, according to some; though others declared that he was born there. As he had been the model of a just and pacific king, so did he desire to be that of a victorious conqueror of nations; and, placing the regency in the hands of Isis, he went forth to war against Asia, accompanied by Thot the ibis and the jackal Anubis. He made little or no use of force and arms, but he attacked men by gentleness and persuasion, softened them with songs in which voices were accompanied by instruments, and taught them also the arts which he had made known to the Egyptians. No country escaped his beneficent action, and he did not return to the banks of the Nile until he had traversed and civilized the world from one horizon to the other.
Sît-Typhon was red-haired and white-skinned, of violent, gloomy, and jealous temper.[*] Secretly he aspired to the crown, and nothing but the vigilance of Isis had kept him from rebellion during the absence of his brother. The rejoicings which celebrated the king's return to Memphis provided Sit with his opportunity for seizing the throne.
* The colour of his hair was compared with that of a red-
haired ass, and on that account the ass was sacred to him.
As to his violent and jealous disposition, see the opinion
of Diodorus Siculus, book i. 21, and the picture drawn by
Synesius in his pamphlet Ægyptius. It was told how he tore
his mother's bowels at birth, and made his own way into the
world through her side.
2 Drawing by Boudier of the gold group in the Louvre
Museum. The drawing is made from a photograph which belonged
to M. de Witte, before the monument was acquired by E. de
Rougé in 1871. The little square pillar of lapis-lazuli,
upon which Osiris squats, is wrongly set up, and the names
and titles of King Osorkon, the dedicator of the triad, are
placed upside down.
He invited Osiris to a banquet along with seventy-two officers whose support he had ensured, made a wooden chest of cunning workmanship and ordered that it should be brought in to him, in the midst of the feast. As all admired its beauty, he sportively promised to present it to any one among the guests whom it should exactly fit. All of them tried it, one after another, and all unsuccessfully; but when Osiris lay down within it, immediately the conspirators shut to the lid, nailed it firmly down, soldered it together with melted lead, and then threw it into the Tanitic branch of the Nile, which carried it to the sea. The news of the crime spread terror on all sides. The gods friendly to Osiris feared the fate of their master, and hid themselves within the bodies of animals to escape the malignity of the new king. Isis cut off her hair, rent her garments, and set out in search of the chest. She found it aground near the mouth of the river[*] under the shadow of a gigantic acacia, deposited it in a secluded place where no one ever came, and then took refuge in Bûto, her own domain and her native city, whose marshes protected her from the designs of Typhon even as in historic times they protected more than one Pharaoh from the attacks of his enemies. There she gave birth to the young Horus, nursed and reared him in secret among the reeds, far from the machinations of the wicked one.[**]
* At this point the legend of the Saïte and Greek period
interpolates a whole chapter, telling how the chest was
carried out to sea and cast upon the Phoenician coast near
to Byblos. The acacia, a kind of heather or broom in this
case, grew up enclosing the chest within its trunk. This
addition to the primitive legend must date from the XVIIIth
to the XXth dynasties, when Egypt had extensive relations
with the peoples of Asia. No trace of it whatever has
hitherto been found upon Egyptian monuments strictly so
called; not even on the latest.
** The opening illustration of this chapter (p. 221) is
taken from a monument at Phihe, and depicts Isis among the
reeds. The representation of the goddess as squatting upon a
mat probably gave rise to the legend of the floating isle of
Khemmis, which HECATÆUS of Miletus had seen upon the lake of
Bûto, but whose existence was denied by Herodotus
notwithstanding the testimony of Hecatæus.
But it happened that Sît, when hunting by moonlight, caught sight of the chest, opened it, and recognizing the corpse, cut it up into fourteen pieces, which he scattered abroad at random. Once more Isis set forth on her woeful pilgrimage. She recovered all the parts of the body excepting one only, which the oxyrhynchus had greedily devoured;[*] and with the help of her sister Nephthys, her son Horus, Anubis, and Thot, she joined together and embalmed them, and made of this collection of his remains an imperishable mummy, capable of sustaining for ever the soul of a god. On his coming of age, Horus called together all that were left of the loyal Egyptians and formed them into an army.[**]
* This part of the legend was so thoroughly well known,
that by the time of the XIXth dynasty it suggested incidents
in popular literature. When Bitiû, the hero of The Tale of
the Two Brothers, mutilated himself to avoid the suspicion
of adultery, he cast his bleeding member into the water, and
the Oxyrhynchus devoured it.
** Towards the Grecian period there was here interpolated
an account of how Osiris had returned from the world of the
dead to arm his son and train him to fight. According to
this tale he had asked Horus which of all animals seemed to
him most useful in time of war, and Horus chose the horse
rather than the lion, because the lion avails for the weak
or cowardly in need of help, whereas the horse is used for
the pursuit and destruction of the enemy. Judging from this
reply that Horus was ready to dare all, Osiris allowed him
to enter upon the war. The mention of the horse affords
sufficient proof that this episode is of comparatively late
origin (cf. p. 41 for the date at which the horse was
acclimatized in Egypt).