that is to say, the
two principal forms of Hathor--the Hermopolitan Nahmauit and
the Heliopolitan lusasit. It would appear from the presence
of these names that there must have been in Egypt two
versions at least of the Phoenician adventures of Isis--the
one of Hermopolitan and the other of Heliopolitan origin.

Their mistress came to see the stranger who had thus treated her
servants, took her into her service, and confided to her the care of her
lately born son. Isis became attached to the child, adopted it for her
own, after the Egyptian manner, by inserting her finger in its mouth;
and having passed it through the fire during the night in order to
consume away slowly anything of a perishable nature in its body,
metamorphosed herself into a swallow, and flew around the miraculous
pillar uttering plaintive cries. Astarte came upon her once while she
was bathing the child in the flame, and broke by her shrieks of
fright the charm of immortality. Isis was only able to reassure her by
revealing her name and the object of her presence there. She opened the
mysterious tree-trunk, anointed it with essences, and wrapping it in
precious cloths, transmitted it to the priests of Byblos, who deposited
it respectfully in their temple: she put the coffin which it contained
on board ship, and brought it, after many adventures, into Egypt.
Another tradition asserts, however, that Osiris never found his way back
to his country: he was buried at Byblos, this tradition maintained, and
it was in his honour that the festivals attributed by the vulgar to the
young Adonis were really celebrated. A marvellous fact seemed to support
this view. Every year a head of papyrus, thrown into the sea at some
unknown point of the Delta, was carried for six days along the Syrian
coast, buffeted by wind and waves, and on the seventh was thrown up at
Byblos, where the priests received it and exhibited it solemnly to the
people.* The details of these different stories are not in every case
very ancient, but the first fact in them carries us back to the time
when Byblos had accepted the sovereignty of the Theban dynasties,
and was maintaining daily commercial and political relations with the
inhabitants of the Nile valley.**

* In the later Roman period it was letters announcing the
resurrection of Adonis-Osiris that the Alexandrian women
cast into the sea, and these were carried by the current as
far as Bybl