His "Followers"—Shosûû Horû—defeated the "Accomplices of Sît"—Samiu Sît—who were now driven in their turn to transform themselves into gazelles, crocodiles and serpents,—animals which were henceforth regarded as unclean and Typhonian. For three days the two chiefs had fought together under the forms of men and of hippopotami, when Isis, apprehensive as to the issue of the duel, determined to bring it to an end. "Lo! she caused chains to descend upon them, and made them to drop upon Horus. Thereupon Horus prayed aloud, saying: 'I am thy son Horus!' Then Isis spake unto the fetters, saying; 'Break, and unloose yourselves from my son Horus!' She made other fetters to descend, and let them fall upon her brother Sit. Forthwith he lifted up his voice and cried out in pain, and she spake unto the fetters and said unto them: 'Break!' Yea, when Sît prayed unto her many times, saying: 'Wilt thou not have pity upon the brother of thy son's mother?' then her heart was filled with compassion, and she cried to the fetters: 'Break, for he is my eldest brother!' and the fetters unloosed themselves from him, and the two foes again stood face to face like two men who will not come to terms." Horus, furious at seeing his mother deprive him of his prey, turned upon her like a panther of the South. She fled before him on that day when battle was waged with Sît the Violent, and he cut off her head. But Thot transformed her by his enchantments and made a cow's head for her, thereby identifying her with her companion, Hâthor.
1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bronze statuette of Saïte
period in the Gîzeh Museum (Mariette, Album photographique
du musée de Boulaq, pl. 5, No. 167).
The war went on, with all its fluctuating fortunes, till the gods at length decided to summon both rivals before their tribunal. According to a very ancient tradition, the combatants chose the ruler of a neighbouring city, Thot, lord of Hermopolis Parva, as the arbitrator of their quarrel. Sît was the first to plead, and he maintained that Horus was not the son of Osiris, but a bastard, whom Isis haô conceived after the death of her husband. Horua triumphantly vindicated the legitimacy of his birth; and Thot condemned Sît to restore, according to some, the whole of the inheritance which he had wrongly retained,—according to others, part of it only. The gods ratified the sentence, and awarded to the arbitrator the title of Ûapirahûhûi: he who judges between two parties. A legend of more recent origin, and circulated after the worship of Osiris had spread over all Egypt, affirmed that the case had remained within the jurisdiction of Sibû, who was father to the one, and grandfather to the other party. Sibû, however, had pronounced the same judgment as Thot, and divided the kingdom into halves—poshûi; Sît retained the valley from the neighbourhood of Memphis to the first cataract, while Horus entered into possession of the Delta. Egypt henceforth consisted of two distinct kingdoms, of which one, that of the North, recognized Horus, the son of Isis, as its patron deity; and the other, that of the South, placed itself under the protection of Sît Nûbîti, the god of Ombos.[*]
* Another form of the legend gives the 27th Athyr as the
date of the judgment, assigning Egypt to Horus, and to Sît
Nubia, or Doshirît, the red land. It must have arisen
towards the age of the XVIIIth dynasty, at a time when their
piety no longer allowed the devout to admit that the
murderer of Osiris could be the legitimate patron of half
the country. So the half belonging to Sît was then placed
either in Nubia or in the western desert, which had, indeed,
been reckoned as his domain from earliest times.
The moiety of Horus, added to that of Sît, formed the kingdom which Sibû had inherited; but his children failed to keep it together, though it was afterwards reunited under Pharaohs of human race.
The three gods who preceded Osiris upon the throne had ceased to reign, but not to live. Râ had taken refuge in heaven, disgusted with his own creatures; Shû had disappeared in the midst of a tempest; and Sibû had quietly retired within his palace when the time of his sojourning upon earth had been fulfilled. Not that there was no death, for death, too, together with all other things and beings, had come into existence in the beginning, but while cruelly persecuting both man and beast, had for a while respected the gods. Osiris was the first among them to be struck down, and hence to require funeral rites. He also was the first for whom family piety sought to provide a happy life beyond the tomb. Though he was king of the living and the dead at Mendes by virtue of the rights of all the feudal gods in their own principalities, his sovereignty after death exempted him no more than the meanest of his subjects from that painful torpor into which all mortals fell on breathing their last. But popular imagination could not resign itself to his remaining in that miserable state for ever. What would it have profited him to have Isis the great Sorceress for his wife, the wise Horus for his son, two master-magicians—Thot the Ibis and the jackal Anubis—for his servants, if their skill had not availed to ensure him a less gloomy and less lamentable after-life than that of men. Anubis had long before invented the art of mummifying, and his mysterious science had secured the everlasting existence of the flesh; but at what a price!
