Osiris Myth - Sources

Sources

The myth of Osiris was very important in ancient Egyptian religion and was popular among ordinary people. One reason for this popularity is the myth's primary religious meaning, which implies that any dead person can reach a pleasant afterlife. Another reason is that the characters and their emotions are more reminiscent of the lives of real people than those in most Egyptian myths, making the story more appealing to the general populace. With this widespread appeal, the myth appears in more ancient texts than any other myth and in an exceptionally broad range of Egyptian literary styles. These sources also provide an unusual amount of detail. Other ancient Egyptian myths are fragmentary and vague. Although the Osiris myth also is fragmentary to an extent, it bears a greater resemblance to a cohesive story.

The earliest mentions of the Osiris myth are in the Pyramid Texts, the first Egyptian funerary texts, which appeared on the walls of burial chambers in pyramids at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, during the 25th century BC. These texts, made up of disparate spells or "utterances", contain ideas that are presumed to date from still earlier times. The texts are concerned with the afterlife of the king buried in the pyramid, so they frequently refer to the Osiris myth, which is deeply involved with kingship and the afterlife. Major elements of the story, such as the death and restoration of Osiris and the strife between Horus and Set, appear in the utterances of the Pyramid Texts.

The same elements from the myth that appear in the Pyramid Texts recur in funerary texts written in later times, such as the Coffin Texts from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC) and the Book of the Dead from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC). Most of these writings were made for the general populace, so the association made in these texts, between Osiris and the dead, is no longer restricted to royalty.

The most complete ancient Egyptian account of the myth is the Great Hymn to Osiris, an inscription from the Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1550–1292 BC) that gives the general outline of the entire story but includes little detail. Another important source is the Memphite Theology, a religious narrative that includes an account of Osiris' death as well as the resolution of the dispute between Horus and Set. This narrative associates the kingship that Osiris and Horus represent with Ptah, the creator deity of Memphis. The text was long thought to date back to the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC) and was treated as a source for information about the early stages in the development of the myth. Since the 1970s, however, Egyptologists have concluded that the text dates from the New Kingdom at the earliest.

Texts related to Osirian rituals come from the walls of Egyptian temples that date from the New Kingdom to the Ptolemaic era of 323–30 BC. Such ritual texts are another major source of information about the myth.

Magical healing spells, which were used by Egyptians of all classes, are the source for an important portion of the myth, in which Horus is poisoned or otherwise sickened, and Isis heals him. The spells identify a sick person with Horus so that he or she can benefit from the goddess' efforts. The spells are known from papyrus copies, which serve as instructions for healing rituals, and from a specialized type of inscribed stone stela called a cippus. People seeking healing poured water over these cippi, an act that was believed to imbue the water with the healing power contained in the text, and then drank the water in hope of curing their ailments. The theme of an endangered child protected by magic also appears on inscribed ritual wands from the Middle Kingdom, which were made centuries before the more detailed healing spells that specifically connect this theme with the Osiris myth.

Episodes from the myth were also recorded in writings intended as entertainment. Prominent among these texts is "The Contendings of Horus and Set", a humorous retelling of several episodes of the struggle between the two deities, which dates to the Twentieth Dynasty (c. 1190–1070 BC). It vividly characterizes the deities involved; as the Egyptologist Donald B. Redford says, "Horus appears as a physically weak but clever Puck-like figure, Seth as a strong-man buffoon of limited intelligence, Re-Horakhty as a prejudiced, sulky judge, and Osiris as an articulate curmudgeon with an acid tongue." Despite its atypical nature, "Contendings" includes many of the oldest episodes in the divine conflict, and many events appear in the same order as in much later accounts, suggesting that a traditional sequence of events was forming at the time that the story was written.

Ancient Greek and Roman writers, who described Egyptian religion late in its history, recorded much of the Osiris myth. Herodotus, in the 5th century BC, mentioned parts of the myth in his description of Egypt in The Histories, and four centuries later, Diodorus Siculus provided a summary of the myth in his Bibliotheca historica. In the early 2nd century AD, Plutarch wrote the most complete ancient account of the myth in De Iside et Osiride, an analysis of Egyptian religious beliefs. Plutarch's account of the myth is the version that modern popular writings most frequently retell. The writings of these classical authors may give a distorted view of Egyptian beliefs. For instance, De Iside et Osiride includes many interpretations of Egyptian belief that are influenced by various Greek philosophies, and its account of the myth contains portions with no known parallel in Egyptian tradition. The Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths concluded that several elements of this account were taken from Greek mythology, and that the work as a whole was not based directly on Egyptian sources. His colleague John Baines, on the other hand, says that temples may have kept written accounts of myths, which later were lost, and that Plutarch could have drawn on such sources to write his narrative.