Osiris, the Living King

In the theology of Heliopolis, Osiris (Wesir in ancient Egyptian) is the firstborn of Geb, god of the earth, and Nut, goddess of the sky. Together with them and with his siblings Isis, Set and Nephthys he makes up the Ennead, the group of nine deities from which the order of the world begins, and he takes his sister Isis as his wife to form the sovereign couple of the myth.

Before he was a king he was grain. Osiris is the god of the vegetation that dies underground and sprouts again, and of the annual flooding of the Nile that leaves silt across the fields: his green or black skin in the iconography is not decoration but those two facts said in colour, the green of the shoot and the black of the fertile mud.

His figure was built by absorbing local gods, and his objects are the trail that process left. At Djedu, the Delta city the Greeks called Busiris, he took the place of Andjety, an older god from whom he inherited the two insignia he will never put down: the crook (heka) and the flail (nekhakha). At Abydos he did the same to Khentiamentiu, "foremost of the westerners", the jackal who guarded the necropolis and whose title ended up as one of his own epithets.

The image of Osiris as a civilising king, the pharaoh who lifted humanity out of savagery, taught it to farm and gave it laws, does not come from Egypt: it comes from the Greek authors, and from them alone. The Egyptian texts allude to the myth without ever narrating it in sequence, and in all of them Osiris is already dead, the deceased king with whom the pharaoh identifies himself when he dies. Not one Egyptian account of his reign survives.

And the two Greeks who do tell it do not tell the same story. Plutarch (On Isis and Osiris, 13) credits him with freeing the Egyptians from a hard and savage life, showing them the fruits, giving them laws and teaching them to honour the gods. Diodorus Siculus (Historical Library I, 14-15) distributes the credit differently: it was Isis who discovered wheat and barley, and Isis who established the laws; what he leaves to Osiris is the discovery of the vine, near Nysa, and the way to treat its fruit.

The current version, the Osiris who taught everything, is Plutarch's with Diodorus rubbed out on top of it. It is worth saying, because the distribution is not a point of scholarly detail: half of what is usually credited to the husband is credited by Diodorus to the wife.

The reign ends at a banquet. Set, Plutarch's Typhon, covets the throne and has a magnificent chest built in secret, taken to the exact measure of his brother's body. During the feast he offers it to whoever fits inside when he lies down; the guests try it and for every one of them it is too large or too small. When Osiris lies down, the conspirators fall upon him, close the lid, seal it with molten lead and throw the chest into the river, which carries it out to sea through the Tanitic mouth.

Nowhere in the story is there a fight. Osiris is not overcome by anyone's strength: he is overcome by an object made to his measure, and for the object to work he has to lie down inside it himself, suspecting nothing.

This entry ends here, with the lid closed. What comes afterwards (the pieces scattered across Egypt, Isis and Nephthys searching for them, the first mummification and the throne of the Duat) belongs to the other half of Osiris and is told in his own entry.