Legend of Isis and Osiris

Iman Mohie
Legend of Isis and Osiris

According to this legend Osiris was King of Egypt, a prosperous and popular ruler.

He had a wicked brother named Seth, who persuaded him on the occasion of a banquet to lie down in an ingeniously contrived chest, which Seth with his 72 accomplices then locked and threw into the Nile.

The river carried it down to the sea, and it was eventually cast ashore at the Phonician town of Byblos.

Meanwhile Isis, Osiris's sister and wife, had been ranging over the world in search of the chest.

Finding it after a long quest, she took it back to Egypt and mourned in solitude for her dead husband; then she concealed the coffin and went to Buto, where her son Horus was brought up.

During her absence Seth had found his hated brother's body while hunting wild boar, cut it up and dispersed the 14 pieces.

Then Isis set out in search of the separate pieces, and when she found one buried it and set up a memorial on the spot, that’s why in Egypt there are numerous tombs of Osiris.

According to a later legend Isis assembled the separate parts of her husband's body, whereupon Osiris briefly returned to life on order to beget his son Horus.

When Horus reached manhood he set to wreak vengeance on his father's murderer, and eventually, after a fierce conflict, defeated and killed him.

According to another account the two contestants were separated by Thoth and thereafter divided Egypt between them, Horus taking the south and Seth the north.

Then it was believed, Horus brought Osiris back to life again by magical means, and Osiris thereafter reigned in the land of the West as King of the Dead.