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An Egypt
An Egypt
The Nile
floodplain
Felucca
boats
Seth (or Set) was the Seth was the God of the
desert, storm and violence, which are all
enemies of the fertile, properous, narrow
valley of the Nile. He was the brother of
Osiris. Seth had killed Osiris by tricking him
into a coffin, which he threw into the Nile.
When Osiris' wife Isis heard about this, she
started searching desperately for her
husband's body, to bury it properly. She asked
everyone she met and finally some children
told her where it was. Isis mourned for her
dead husband. Then she hid the body, while
she went back to look after her son Horus, still
a baby. Seth was terrified that Isis might be
able to bring Osiris back from the dead, since
she was a great magician. So Seth found
where she had hidden the body and cut it into
pieces, which he scattered up and down the
Nile. Now Isis had to find all the scattered
pieces of Osiris. Whenever she found a piece,
she buried it there and built a shrine. This
means that there are lots of places in Egypt
where Osiris was buried! Osiris himself
became the King of the Dead, and all
Egyptians hoped they would join him after
death.
Isis
Horus, the son of Osiris, was the god of balance and harmony,
assigned to maintain the maat of Egypt. His function was to ensure
the continuing existence and activity of the gods on earth by means of
religious acts and to maintain the natural order such as the flow of the
Nile an the fertility of the soil. He did not rule by the consent of the
governed but by the decision of the gods. (Nagle, 25)
The Bent
Pyramid
The burial of the king, as well as his passage from this world to
the next, was not simply a private affair of importance only to
the royal family and its retinue but an event of national
significance. The ritual cycle by which the living pharaoh, the
god Horus, became Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, guaranteed
the survival of Egypt itself. By expressing this act in
architectural form in the building of the pyramids, the kings of
the Old Kingdom stumbled onor perhaps cunningly deviseda
method of unifying all Egyptians in a single religion of ancestor
worship in which the pyramids served as giant reliquaries.
(Nagle, 27-28)
Post-empire
Egyptian
Drawings of Two
Different Tribes of
Sea People