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 AEgyptius. It was told how he tore
his mother's bowels at birth, and made his own way into the
world through her side.

[Illustration: 250.jpg THE OSMIAN TRIAD HOKUS. OSIRIS, ISIS. 2]

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
Rouge 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 Buto, 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 Saite 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 i