ced to earlier and later
sources is very uncertain. The main outlines, which may be primitive,
are as follow. Osiris was a civilising king of Egypt, who was murdered
by his brother Set and seventy-two {39} conspirators. Isis, his wife,
found the coffin of Osiris at Byblos in Syria and brought it to Egypt.
Set then tore up the body of Osiris and scattered it. Isis sought the
fragments, and built a shrine over each of them. Isis and Horus then
attacked Set and drove him from Egypt, and finally down the Red Sea.
In other aspects Osiris seems to have been a corn god, and the
scattering of his body in Egypt is like the well-known division of the
sacrifice to the corn god, and the burial of parts in separate fields
to ensure their fertility.

How we are to analyse the formation of the early myths is suggested by
the known changes of later times. When two tribes who worshipped
different gods fought together and one overcame the other, the god of
the conqueror is always considered to have overcome the god of the
vanquished. The struggle of Horus and Set is expressly stated on the
Temple of Edfu to have been a tribal war, in which the followers of
Horus overcame those of Set, established garrisons and forges at
various places down the Nile valley, and finally ousted the Set party
from the whole land. We can hardly therefore avoid reading the history
of the animosities of the gods as being the struggles of their
worshippers.

{40}

If we try to trace the historic basis of the Osiris myth, we must take
into account the early customs and ideas among which the myths arose.
The cutting up of the body was the regular ritual of the prehistoric
people, and (even as late as the fifth dynasty) the bones were
separately treated, and even wrapped up separately when the body was
reunited for burial. We must also notice the apotheosis festival of
the king, which was probably his sacrificial death and union with the
god, in the prehistoric age. The course of events which might have
served as the basis for the Osiris myth may then have been somewhat as
follows. Osiris was the god of a tribe which occupied a large part of
Egypt. The kings of this tribe were sacrificed after thirty years'
reign (like the killing of kings at fixed intervals elsewhere), and
they thus became the Osiris himself. Their bodies were dismembered, as
usual at that period, the flesh ceremonially eaten by the assembled
people (as was done in prehistoric tim