Osiris, Lord of the Dead - Mythillogical

this video is sponsored by skillshare more to come on that shortly [Music] well crofty i don't know about you but what gets me in the mood for the nice wintry christmas season is to to to decide to do an episode on a part of the world that's absolutely scorching hot so maybe a bit of wishful thinking going on on our behalf at the moment yeah i'm hoping that that might cancel out just how cold my flat is right now yeah you've got a cold flat you're just coming off a cold so everything's linking up dramatically excellent we are a holistic podcast hello everybody welcome back to mythological i of course i'm charles i'm joined here today by crofty and i think we should probably subtitle this episode the walking dead given both the subject of what we're talking about and the fact that we ourselves are kind of coming in a little worse for where for this particular episode help me crafty uh yes today i'm not crofty i'm bob fleming here excuse me for anyone who remembers 90s british comedy yeah that is i think 99 of our audience so we should be fine and i if i sound a little different today folks i'm coming to you from my sofa which is a lot comfier than my desk chair upstairs because i've managed to re-injure my back which various people keep up with what i'm doing you might know either having on and off back troubles so i'm coming to you from my nice comfy cushion fortress that i've constructed and i might sound a little different because the room acoustics are nothing like the tiny tiny office i normally record things in but hopefully that's not too big bigger a problem so yeah maybe listen to this episode on speakers not headphones is all i will say yeah and if i sound a little different i've had a cold for a week it's definitely a cold not anything that has any greek letters after it so no need to worry about me just yeah my voice is a bit uh a bit difficult to work with so today's drinking game instead of pronunciations is you take a drink whenever crofty coughs best of luck to your livers yep well the show must go on so crofty what are we here today to discuss we are here to discuss one of the egyptian gods the god of the dead the god of resurrection who i could really use some praying to right now osiris [Music] so this might strike our listeners as a little bit of an unusual choice today so i don't know about you crafty i've wanted to do an episode to do with ancient egyptian mythology ever since we kind of touched on some small aspects of it at the back at the beginning of uh when the podcast even launched when we were doing the dragons episodes but this might be not what people are expecting so rather than trying to give a big overview of all of egyptian mythology which we could well try to do we've gone for a more focused topic today and i think it will become apparent as we discuss things why we made that choice yes i this was definitely a subject i've been looking forward to because i loved all egyptian mythology type stuff as a kid but yes if we tried to give cover a broader topic i think it would have driven us both mad yes because we were struggling even with a fairly narrow topic to pull this down to our normal more streamlined version of presenting events the simple reason that egyptian mythology is a bit of a minefield for contradictions missing information and just all sorts of different interpretations from later authors that we'll get in today yeah i think i described to you this morning chelsea comparison of a jigsaw with a lot of pieces missing and that becoming my recurring nightmare so crofty if we're going to talk about one specific egyptian god and one specific myth associated with him do you want to start by giving us a little bit of an introduction to who osiris is so osiris was one of the most popular and most commonly worshipped gods throughout egypt he had previously had an aspect as the ruler of the world of the living but by the time of the egyptian society that we know of as the old kingdom which was where egypt first began to get fully unified he was considered the ruler of the dead and the god of resurrection and it was essentially him who the souls of the deceased would appear before be judged and their final destination would be determined yep that sounds like a good overview so crofty we normally start out these episodes or at least we've fallen into a habit of doing by asking what was your previous familiarity not only with the figure of osiris but i think as is fair today to ask what was your familiarity with ancient egyptian religion and mythology as a whole well i consider myself quite lucky in that we did a lot about egyptian mythology in primary school which as i think i might have said in the heracles episode does seem strange in hindsight when it is an english primary school in a small village where the vicar would come in and talk christianity every friday that they still went into quite a lot of classes about ancient gods like egyptians and greeks so i knew the names and had a lot of vague memories of the stories of these gods just from my childhood although i'm learning again that it was very heavily sanitized yes and made much more kid-friendly so i first really encountered the more grown-up version of osiris by reading the comedy novel odds and gods by tom holt as a teenager where osiris resides in the droitwich retirement home for retired deities about two miles east and three miles up from the british town of droitwich and he is a cantankerous old man in a wheelchair complaining that no one worships him anymore yeah that sounds pretty appropriate yeah i had much less of an exposure to anything to do with ancient egypt in my actual schooling system so a lot of my previous knowledge of this topic comes from you know general cultural osmosis in the past i have read through entire textbooks on ancient egypt as part of research for individual videos over on the histocrat channel but i've never really sat down and just focused on their religious systems as a whole how it was constructed and how it functioned and i have some vague memories of being taught the central osiris smith during my schooling but i couldn't for the life of you tell you where it act like where and when it actually occurred i just know that i was taught it at some point because i know the bit about osiris as body being dismembered and put back together which we're going to be discussing in detail outside of that i kind of have to rely on basically knowledge from things like the game age of mythology in order to paper over kind of the blank spots in my memory and literally then it was just oh the egyptians were a civilization in this game and if you whenever you went up an age you chose a god to worship and i was like oh yeah um god of writing yeah cool that guy so that was uh the extent really of my exposure to the topic i think there's one other association with osiris that i think we both will have in common in that uh any iron maiden fans oh yes might know the words to power slave which well i don't think it mentions him by name does cover the myth quite well yeah it's funny where you pick these things up from yeah right so before we get prop we started then on the topic of who osiris was what role he played in ancient egyptian religion and the main myth of egyptian religion which he figures highly prominently within if you're listening to the audio version of this podcast on all good audio platforms such as spotify apple podcasts etc you can also head over to the histogram channel where a version of this podcast is up with a few additional video elements included so you can kind of see what we're talking about as we go along and of course if you want to support the channel and the podcast a little bit further you can always head over to twitter.com the underscore histocrat where i tend to let people know in advance what the next topic of the podcast is going to be and you can help support the channel over at patreon.com thehistocrat and of course before we properly get started we'd like to take a moment to talk about this episode's sponsor so this episode is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes to explore if your new year's resolution was to take up a hobby raise one of your current skills to the next level or even to turn your passion project into your day job skillshare can help you to achieve that goal skillshare's classes are aimed at every skill level and cover all sorts of topics including art and design media production writing crafts music productivity and marketing whether it's a specific technique you need to take your project to the next level or if you need help in bringing out your own unique style skillshare can help you discover the tools you need for example just look at crofty outside of this podcast he's also working on music drawing and pyrography his goal for this year is to take each to a level that he can share with the world and to find his own style in the process that's where skillshare comes in with andy j pizza's course find your style five exercises to unlock your creative identity here andy describes his experience of feeling inauthentic in his art and the ways he experimented to bring out his own identity and find success both as an illustrator and a podcaster crofty is already seeing progress in his work and with andy's help you can too skillshare provides an uninterrupted learning experience meaning no ads and they're always launching new premium classes so you constantly have new directions take your creative journey with short video lessons designed to fit any schedule projects to keep you focused and engaged and a large community of fellow creatives around the world you'll always be able to find the encouragement and the inspiration you need and if that wasn't enough the first 1000 subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can start exploring your creativity today okay before we actually get going then crofty i just want to quickly take a moment to list these sources that we used in order to put together today's podcast so i ended up using a few different resources in order to get like an overview of ancient egyptian society and religion which i'm going to go into shortly i used the complete gods and goddesses of ancient egypt by richard h wilkinson i briefly had a bit of a flick through exploring religion in ancient egypt by stephen quirk and i also had a look through a volume which i quite enjoy which was a history of ancient egypt by mark vandemir so maybe check that one out if you want to see a single concise history of egypt for all of its ancient forms in addition to this i also used a couple of articles in addition to the greek works that i'm going to be going into in my section later on which are isis osiris and serapis by martin bomas which i think is actually a chapter from the oxford handbook of roman egypt i also use the articles the sources of deodorant secures by charles e muntz and the article plutarch on isis and osiris by daniel s richter so i used quite a variety of sources for this episode there were three main books that i drew from there was osiris the history and legacy of the ancient egyptian god of the dead by marcus carabas there was abydos egypt's first pharaohs and the cult of osiris by david b o'connor and there was egyptian mythology a guide to the gods goddesses and traditions of ancient egypt by geraldine pinch for primary sources i found a translation of the pyramid text from the pyramid of unass on pyramid textsonline.com in terms of academic works i found several papers i drew from including a functional approach to egyptian myth and mythemes by katya garbs the relation of marduk asher and osiris by sydney smith early monuments from berceris in the egyptian delta by henry g fischer and a phd thesis called manifestations of the dead in ancient egyptian coffin texts by anne maria landford and one thing that i also want to do before we get going i think i've said that four times by now is a quick shout out to the person who is going to be editing the video version of this podcast which is byron so byron his himself a youtuber you can check him out over at his youtube channel byron lewis where he specializes in doing historical based content with much more of a humorous bent basically if you're familiar with the works of charlie brooker he is the historical version of that historical and hysterical hmm that's an auspicious start for us right let's get on with it so for today's episode of crafty what kind of planning on doing is i'm going to start as i think is only fair by giving the listeners something of a breakdown of ancient egyptian religion and mythology as a whole so you can kind of understand the context of the osiris role and myth crofty you're going to give us a nice overview of the admittedly somewhat fragmentary remains on this subject that come to us from the actual ancient egyptian period and then i'm going to cover the most expansive versions of this myth in the form of the greek interpretations of osiris and his role does that sound like a slice of fried gold that sounds good to me okay let's get going so whilst we are here today to discuss a specific god and the myth which is most associated i think it would be remiss of us to get going without giving people something of a general overview of ancient egyptian religion because it's something of a confusing place we have to say and i really want to stress that this explanation and this overview that i'm going to be given will be a very general one as we're talking about a religious system here that effectively existed for more than 3 000 years so kind of from the early dynastic or proto-dynastic period of ancient egypt in the fourth millennium bc all the way through to the point where ancient rome kind of converted over to christianity and started to stamp out pagan religions this system is also complicated by the fact that it's a system that contains well over a thousand different gods and goddesses so as is fairly appropriate most of the sources i consulted when doing my research for this video started off their discussion of this religious system with some statement along the lines of yeah it's pretty bewildering you have a gigantic number of gods and goddesses some of them are anthropomorphic some of them take on the forms of animals others are a combination of animals and humans and just to complicate everything a little bit further some of these gods have more than one different form in which they're represented often associated with the particular role that they're playing with in mythology or the way in which they are being invoked what then makes things additionally complicated is that these depictions are not always understood as being an actual representation of a given god's appearance or form so the best example i've found of this is the god amun who is also known as the hidden god with an egyptian mythology and who at times served as the paramount god of egypt and we'll get a little into what paramounts see amongst the goats in egypt actually meant so whilst the moon was often represented as a man with two plumes on his head it was actually thought that he had a largely imperceptible nature as by his own name of the hidden or the invisible god he was fought to exist in all things so on top of these complications you also have gods that were either combined or associated together over time so the most famous examples of this are associations such as those between the sun god ra or rey and the moon as we just mentioned before the association of ra and horus under a name which i'm probably going to butcher which was ra haracti i believe i don't think any ancient egyptians are listening to characters yeah thankfully uh i don't think too many people can be worried about that one for once and then other examples of this which are quite relevant today's subject include the equation of osiris and the god apis particularly after the latter's death as the combined deity of osiris which is then even more confusing because the apis was originally supposed to be a manifestation of the god tar is it all petar but later on became considered a manifestation of the osiris soul or as his bar which is again only an element of the ancient egyptian understanding of the soul so yeah this is all probably slightly bewildering to anyone who's listening now and don't worry there's not going to be a quiz on that afterwards i'm just trying to get across it there were lots of different gods who were worshipped in varying forms and many different concepts often quite elusive to us now were involved in their worship and i think i should also quickly mention because we'll be talking quite a lot about this particular goddess due to her association with osiris is that around the end of the late egyptian period isis was also equated with a whole host of other female deities within both the egyptian religious system but notably also within greek and roman religion so crofty to put aside this staggering range of gods and goddesses ancient egyptian religion is very different from our modern concepts of religions that we see alive around us today so i think the best description i saw of it was that ancient egyptian religion is very much religion without a book so it lacks any single central written account of its overall mythology as you might find in say the torah or the christian bible or the quran and this reflects very much that there doesn't seem to have been like an absolute formalization of religion throughout all of ancient egypt whilst there are a wide number of myths that we now know of that existed within the system many of them are preserved only really as scraps or through illusions in other texts rather than being properly laid out and described in detail which as you're going to be discussing the egyptian sources for the osiris myth i think you came across that in your research didn't you yes i know we've mentioned a few um explanations that have been put forward as to why a more coherent narrative hasn't survived over time that's kind of giving the game away a little bit when we get to discussing your sections but uh not to worry so that's very much the case for the egyptian sources for the main myth of osiris that we're going to be discussing today thankfully we are balanced out by some later accounts that come to us from greek authors that we will discuss in due course what complicates matters even more is that some myths within egyptian religion appear to have had different versions a lot of the time this is due to them being propagated by different centers within egypt so a good example of this is how in richard wilkinson's work that i mentioned before he listed at least three different origin stories for the creation of the world that were claimed by various different centers around ancient egypt all of which kind of resemble each other in the they detail the creation of the world by the primordial gods but depending on whether these stories came to us from the centers of heliopolis hermopolis or memphis the progenitor gods listed very much differ from one another so in some versions the creator god is god known as atum in some he's the previously mentioned tar who is very much a kind of a craftsman like god figure or in the case of hermopolis there are eight separate primordial gods listed so already when we're discussing even the basic origin stories within egyptian religion life's getting complicated just a little bit yeah let's summarize this down a bit now crafty let's try and make things a little bit easier and talk about what we can generally say about the egyptian pantheon as a whole rather than trying to get hung up on individual gods goddesses and the roles that they play i think the most important caveat we probably have to keep in mind is the information we have on the gods and the worship system of ancient egypt come to us almost entirely from the official cults and monuments erected by the egyptian state rather than you know individual devotations from the average man and woman so how most of the egyptian populous actually would have related to the egyptian gods is kind of difficult for us to determine and and today we're really going to be limited to the official view of egyptian religion that was propagated by the pharaohs and various rulers of that nation so to the best of our understanding many of the egyptian gods were considered as representing natural forces within the world and indeed their forms and many of the ideas of ancient egyptian mythology seem to be influenced by the geography of ancient egypt which is appropriate because ancient egypt had an unusual geography it's quite similar to uh ancient mesopotamia in that egyptian society existed in an area that suffered from very very low rainfall so it was surrounded on most sides by desert which came to really symbolize chaos and disorder within their system an actual ancient egyptian society very much depended on the nile river valley for its existence and specifically relied on the annual flood of denial which would deposit fertile silt onto its banks on which crops could then be grown so kind of a simple form of irrigation that the ancient egyptians then improved upon over time these circumstances very much influenced the egyptian pantheon as did things like the passage of the sun so if you're in ancient egypt the sun rises in the east passes through the sky and sets in the west and from this we get the basic idea that the sun god ra was reborn each morning in the east traverse through the sky during the day then either died or descended into the underworld in the west where he would remain until the next day as a result of this the west bank of the nile very much became associated with the underworld in egyptian mythology and it's for this reason that many of the elites of egyptian society would choose to be buried on the west side of the nile so the exact origins of the egyptian gods go back into its prehistory to the best of our knowledge many of its later deities seem to originated there as local gods prior to the unification of egypt and some of these then went on to absorb other local gods and to take on prominent roles in the later egyptian pantheon exactly when this more unified pantheon emerged is unknown it could be associated with the unification of egypt as a single state during the early dynastic period which took place during the late 4th millennium bc onwards but we know for a fact that it seems to have been firmly in place by the end of the early dynastic period and around the beginning of the old kingdom of egypt around 2700 bc so during this period we see plenty of evidence in iconography for the existence of figures such as horus set hafor and the fertility god of men and we already start to see the varying different types of representations of deities appearing from this point so during my reading i kind of came across the idea that egyptian deities became more anthropomorphized over time they became more and more depicted as human-like figures but i have seen other accounts and descriptions of ancient egyptian religion that basically rubbished this idea and claimed that all these forms have been in some form of existence since the very beginnings of the unified pantheon so it's a little confusing i'm not going to go too much further into that as i mentioned before by the period of the old kingdom of egypt many religious conventions became more formalized so the worship of the gods became more formalized the temple layouts of the period became more formalized and from this point onwards we really know that the gods were generally considered dangerous natural forces by the egyptians and that they had to be appeased in specific ways by the populace in order to avoid that ire each of these gods would be venerated in the form of its cult statue which was held within its official shrine and was attended to as if the statue itself was alive so again a very similar system to that as what we see in ancient mesopotamia where each god or goddess had their own cult statue during this period the worship of many of these gods and goddesses continued to be associated with specific towns and centres which in some cases were likely where they originated even after the introduction of this more unified pantheon one major development within egyptian religion was that much of its practice became centered around the role played by the pharaoh who in life was equated with the figure of horus who was the egyptian god of both kingship and later the sky and in death the pharaoh was similarly related to osiris uh in his role as the ruler of the dead and as the father of horus the rule of the pharaoh increasingly also came to be seen as a requirement in order to maintain the normal cosmic order of egyptian society which is a concept referred to as the ma'at or mat uh again probably completely butchering pronunciation of that yeah i'm i'm just going to say matt i think matt yeah and much as when the kingship was disputed between the gods within different periods of egyptian mythology it was believed that when the ruling pharaoh was unable to perform both his secular and his religious duties chaos would once again be unleashed throughout egypt as epitomized in what's known as the free intermediate periods of egypt where centralized rule broke down for protect um for protracted periods so the final thing i really want to note for the sake of this episode is that whilst this resulting religious system was polytheistic in nature so it worshipped a wide variety of different gods who all had their own official cults there was usually at most times in egyptian history a prominent or a chief god so throughout egyptian history examples of this include horus ra and his role as the sun god amun and particularly in the late period isis also became the paramount goddess within the egyptian system and a detail that is perhaps most important for us and for our telling of the osiris myth is that it was entirely possible the gods of ancient egypt to die just like the mortals that served them however and this is a very important however just like their worshippers the death of an egyptian god did not mean that their existence came to an end which crofty i believe we're going to be discussing in some detail today yep that is the plan now that we have some understanding of the generalities of egyptian religion i think if we are to discuss the osiris myth and put it in its proper context and the role that he played within the wider religious system of egypt we probably also need to follow on from my last point and discuss the egyptian idea of the afterlife yes so i will start with a just a brief overview of where the soul would was thought to have gone after an egyptian died and how that fit into the religion slightly before going into the actual osiris myth proper and into the uh various scattered sources that we can draw from so the egyptian afterlife was divided into three destinations for the majority of people with a fourth that was only really accessible by the pharaohs and possibly their queens so the first recorded afterlife that i could find is for the intellect aspect of the pharaoh soul known as the ack which was thought to be restored to their body which was then transformed into god and it would sit beside horus in the heavens for eternity i say this was only accessible to the pharaohs and as you said charles it sort of fitted in with this concept of maps yeah and of presiding over the order of the universe and the pharaoh as being necessary to maintain that order and the process of how this transformation occurs and how the soul travels to the heavens is described in the spells of the pyramid texts which are inscriptions on the inner walls of the pyramids found from the old kingdom onwards it's not until the middle kingdom which is roughly considered between the end of the third millennium bc and about halfway through the second millennium bc where we start to see evidence of destinations in the afterlife for my notes have the word commoners but really that it's anyone below the fair anyone to be more active anyone below the pharaoh his immediate kind of surrounding court to nobility and the priests i think is what we probably mean there essentially it was people who could afford it which i think is a yeah is a good uh says a bit about the society um so yes in this period so to get these spells to direct someone through the afterlife being inscribed on the inside of coffins and so it became known as the coffin texts and then in the new kingdom we're looking about halfway through the second millennium bc to about the end of the second millennium bc we start to see actual papyrus writings of these kinds of spells and descriptions of the afterlife which became known as the book of the dead and one of these two texts was required by the deceased in order for them to traverse paths of the underworld which was known as the duet pass through the various other worldly dangers and receive whichever form of eternal life they would be granted the duet itself as the name would imply is split into two paths one of which would lead to the resting place of osiris's dead body looking upon it would grant a person rebirth and the other path led to what was known as the field of reeds which is quite similar in concept to the greek elysian fields or even some ideas of the christian heaven essentially presiding forever in the presence of osiris and every once in need would be met however to be granted entry to the field of reeds the deceased was effectively put on trial and the weight of their sins weight of the sins upon their heart was balanced against the weight of a symbol called the feather of mat which symbolized truth justice and order and if their sins outweighed this feather then the soul was devoured by the demon goddess amit i think this is probably one of the uh one of the scenes of a judicial mythology that most people out there may be casually familiar with because it tends to be one which is depicted quite prominently within uh various tomb paintings and decorations yeah there are quite a few paintings warning against essentially warning against sin yeah because this is what you're gonna get yeah you're good you're gonna get yeah you're gonna get your heart eaten by a weird crocodile entity okay mate it's it's not worth it right yeah that would stop me sinning and the one final section that is found in some of these coffin texts in the book of the dead gives a later section of the afterlife for people who had reached the field of reads where they could choose to pass further and become a direct servant of ra and of osiris and as we discussed in dragons 2 way back when they would be part of the armies of ra and be called upon to defend his son chariot against the dragon apep so i'm not going to go into detail on that particular aspect of the afterlife because we went into it quite a bit back in dragons too so once you're done with this episode go listen to dragons too yeah keep circulating the tapes yeah yeah so i think that's a good enough overview of the afterlife to be getting on with for now before we get into the actual detail of the myth yeah right and so with that i think it's time to actually talk about osiris himself properly yeah after 40 minutes or so of preamble yeah nothing new yeah so the origins of the osiris myth itself are quite unclear and they've been subject to quite a lot of debate because prior to the greek conquest of egypt the egyptian sources are very fragmentary as i keep saying now and they very rarely make a direct reference to certain events so instead a lot of aspects of the story are alluded to in cult writings such as inscriptions at the city of abidos which was the cult center of osiris middle kingdom onwards and as well as that they are in the three types of funerary texts that i've mentioned previously there's a few different explanations for why actual direct tellings of the story aren't really found the first one was put forward by scholars in the 1970s including jan assman who claimed that the whole narrative didn't actually come about until either the late middle kingdom or the early new kingdom long after the funerary practices had been established and they instead suggested that osiris is the god of resurrection and regeneration was believed in and used in the funerary practices but didn't have a story until later on the story was written to explain the illusions that were made in the spells and rituals as part of the funeral texts which seems a little bit backwards to me yeah and a lot of later scholars did reject this explanation because essentially it was backwards and there was not really anything directly to prove it so it seemed to be making a pretty large leap of logic it seems like an explanation made up to try and explain why as you say we don't have initial sources covering early parts of egyptian history even though like it probably makes more logical sense that those sources haven't survived because because otherwise why would the practices have happened at the end of the day unless there's something else that i'm missing here that's it to me it would be like saying that in a christian funeral where they refer to being resurrected as jesus was but not having an actual bible story yeah discussing jesus being resurrected and saying that that came later yeah it's like um if you made up a story in retrospect to explain why the crucifix is a prominent symbol of in christianity something like that it it just it just doesn't make sense at the end of the day exactly so the later explanation that does seem a bit more logical is that the myth had existed since before these funeral texts came about and the among larger society it was passed down as an oral retelling and that the only writings that existed were kept by priests generally hoarded in the temples and kept secret so that the knowledge was controlled by the priests yeah and that being written on papyrus these original writings wouldn't have survived yeah i mean we've got got two things there i mean um you say papyrus is as a material is difficult to preserve and then the other thing i just want to quickly mention was that some of the greek sources i'll be discussing with this myth make similar claims as that might that might have been what happened yeah so i feel that that is the more the more reasonable explanation as to why we don't have much information from that time so several origins for the figure of osiris himself have been presented as well there's one theory that osiris originated from an amalgamation of two older mesopotamian gods one of them being marduk who you might again remember from dragons too oh i'm gonna immediately pour cold water on that one crofty but continue oh it's pro again probably probably wrong but the theory has been presented yeah so yeah i'm i'm not saying this is right i'm saying this has been suggested yeah so yeah he he was one of the rules of the gods in southern mesopotamia and the patron of babylon as we mentioned in dragon's toe and the other god that cyrus is associated with from mesopotamia is asher who was the ruler of the gods in northern mesopotamia yeah i think my perspective on that claim is during the old kingdom of egypt for example babylon was a small administrative center in mesopotamia with no well international is probably the wrong word but with no wider influence beyond that basically so marduk himself was not really elevated to the central god of the southern and central mesopotamian plains until well into the babylonian period in fact i would argue that the elevation of the cult of marduk to take over the role of the king of the gods end low sounds like probably is a better candidate for that theory the elevation of marduk does not probably occur until a thousand years after the old kingdom ah so i would throw a lot of cold water on that theory is all i'm saying i very much appreciate that because yes the sources i had didn't have those dates to explain it and it gives a lot more context to the fact that i'm about to go and reject it now yeah okay that's excellent wow i love it when a plan comes together yeah yeah we totally planned that yep so the evidence that's put forward evidence during inverted finger commas here let's put forward for this theory is that the similarities with early depictions of osiris as a ruler of the living are supposedly shared between these three figures the idea that he inherited it from his father who was a sky guard is again apparently shared by these these three figures and they were all thought of as bringing civilization fertility and order to the land and contending with their personification of chaos but as i say evidence to support any of this is very limited and is essentially based on oh look these three look similar and as you've just said charles quite a lot to debunk it so it seems to be there's a lot of cherry picking going on yeah and mythology as a whole to try and make this association yeah i can see that being some an association that the peoples of that region would have made in you know the later second millennium bc or something like that just because there are some similarities between maddox contention with tiermat and horace's contention was set that we're going to talk a little bit about today we also have to take into account there's also similar uh deities that were then associated with these figures throughout these the mediterranean so you can see where that idea could come from but yeah i don't think it really holds up in terms of the idea that that is an origin point for osiris yeah the more likely explanation is that osiris originated as a local god in pre-dynastic egypt that then as egypt became unified sort of absorbed the roles of other similar local gods and became the main figure as one of the rulers of the living and then rulers of the dead yeah that something similar happened with quite a few other deities so for example horus is known to have absorbed a whole bunch of other falcon gods after originating as a local god as well so similar process for those two exactly so the the location where osiris was thought to originate from is the city of berceris and there's been quite a lot of artifacts from berserius that have been uncovered which describe osiris as specifically the lord of buseris rather than the lord of egypt or the lord of the two kingdoms or the various other names for the country and the world as a whole so that does suggest a more local origin for him and the earliest of those artifacts is a limestone slab that dates to the sixth dynasty in the old kingdom that's one of the earliest mentions outside of any funeral texts or pyramids that mentions osiris as a ruler there are some later artifacts at buceris that name osiris as the lord of buseris and of aberdos abbados is a city where the largest cult center of osiris has been excavated and so there's been some suggestion that maybe he originated there as a local god instead but there's not really anything old enough yet been found to contend with the idea of him originating the berseris by the time of the middle kingdom however abidos was quite firmly established as the center of the cult of osiris a lot of dead pharaohs most notably seti the first from the 13th century bc had temples dedicated to them in their reborn aspect as a god associated with osiris there and so i'd recommend the book that i mentioned in the references section on the archaeology of abidos if you're particularly interested in that business does also contain evidence of early isis worship which lends a bit further weight to berserus as the place where osiris originated as isis and osiris are pretty much always associated as together they were brother and sister and husband and wife and so it's almost impossible to really find one without the other in egypt there is also one hypothesis that suggests that osiris was based on a local mortal ruler of a shepherd tribe in pre-dynastic egypt whose benevolent rule then led to him becoming revered as a god and one thing that cited us evidence for this hypothesis is that he is always depicted or almost always depicted with a shepherd's crook and a shepherd's flail and the fact that some of the pyramid texts do make a reference to a jewel nature of osiris as both a man and a god that sort of claim is also one a lot of the greek authors on this subject also like to use that not just osiris but many of the early gods of the egyptian pantheon that they were initially uh mortal rulers that were similar to the way that romans and greeks would elevate particular individuals to uh the honor of immortality that these early egyptian figures were actually just mortal rulers who later became gods due to their deeds on on the earth yeah and it makes a lot of sense in context of what was believed to happen to the pharaohs following death as well and the pharaohs would ascend to godhood so it makes sense that the original gods ascended the same way yeah it's one of those where it's like it's interesting it does have some parallels with related practices but unfortunately there just is no way of proving it because we're in a you know a pre-literate period of egypt unfortunately yeah it's an interesting idea at least yeah so to understand how osiris evolved over time i think it's important i sort of reiterate and build on a couple of key concepts that you mentioned charles when discussing the gods as a whole yeah and the idea of the concept of immortality so in our heracles episode i mentioned a description of the greek gods idea of immortality where in terms of personality and in terms of in terms of their godly aspects and abilities being essentially fixed you know they had a set sphere of influence and they had a set personality and their character didn't develop over time and the egyptians saw the gods and their immortality slightly differently like you said charles about being unsure whether a god was a primordial force a figure or just a vague concept there are i would say a lot of references that refer to a god as an individual figure as a person but also that referring to god is a set of traits that another figure can take on yeah so for example i'm going to go into the idea of the pharaohs taking on the aspect of osiris as the god of rebirth and becoming osiris additionally as we mentioned there was not a single ruler over the gods or a ruler over the world living like there was in greece there was instead a set line of succession between the gods and so osiris was as ruler of the living second to last in this line of succession that stretched back to was atom you said yeah atom the primordial uh entity who basically arose in versions of their creation of basically arose all of creation from the primordial waters yeah that that guy yeah great guy yeah thumbs up big fan of his work yeah yeah i'd say so yes rather than having a set ruler there was a line of succession that was it was also actually inheritance rather than taking the throne as when zeus took the throne from cronus it was more that the the gods had planned to hand over the throne to their successor in these ways egyptian gods could actually evolve and change within their narrative rather than because the religion as a whole changed and that's rarely seen in the greek gods and that also informed the egyptian concept of immortality which rather than implying fixed and ageless implies a cycle of birth death and rebirth much as you said with ra being born in the morning dying in the evening passing through the underworld and being reborn again yeah i mean i think the ancient egyptians i might be misremembering this point but i think the ancient egyptians even considered all of creation to be existing in such a cyclical manner where for example the atom version of the origin myth it was expected that at the end of this current reality atom would effectively wrap up existence and return it to the primordial waters yeah i i've heard that version as well so yeah i couldn't tell you the details i'm afraid no same here in terms of individual gods though it was often it was generally considered that osiris was the one providing the regenerative power to each god as they were reborn and so understanding those those three concepts does sort of help with understanding the myth as a whole and how it informed the funeral practices so from what we can gather of the story of osiris and his life he inherited the throne as ruler of egypt from his father who was the earth god gab and his mother who was the sky goddess newt and he ruled alongside his sister wife isis as i say this came from a long line of god kings and together their rule was associated with bringing life and fertility to the land imposing the concept of mart or order and balancing this order out with chaos which was represented by set however by the time of the old kingdom or by the time of seeing these artifacts in the mid old kingdom i should say this role had then changed osiris had become the ruler of the underworld and the god of the dead and so it's here in the old kingdom that we see the first images of osiris where he is always depicted as having a mummified body if he's depicted as standing sometimes he's shown with arms crossed over his chest as the body was placed in a sarcophagus alternatively he is depicted as being sat on a throne his skin is either depicted as green which symbolizes rebirth or is black which symbolizes the fertility of the nile flood plains and as mentioned previously he is always carrying the shepherd's crook and the flail from this point onwards the majority of the written references to osiris are from the text i've mentioned as the pyramid texts these are sets of inscriptions that covered the entire inner walls of the pyramids with each inscription being a spell that would form part of the funerary ritual the purpose of the ritual was to ensure that pharaoh who was being entombed would be reborn in the heavens in order to live forever among the gods rather than passing into the netherworld and either being destroyed or living in the netherworld as the commoners would of the surviving pyramid texts no two are the same each pharaoh would have a bespoke selection of spells which is thought to be determined by their priests as giving them the strongest chance of resurrection so the various pyramid texts contain several pieces of important information about the resurrection of osiris about his role among the gods and the egyptian religion and how he granted resurrection to the pharaohs before i go into that i do have to address the elephant in the tomb in that i have mentioned him as the former king of the gods i have mentioned him being resurrected but i have not yet said anything about how he died yeah and that's because at no point in any of the surviving egyptian literature is osiris death described or directly referred to yeah that's that's very different from the cultural impression that you kind of get of that story you get this impression that it it is a developed narrative in ancient egyptian times where that really seems because you remarked to me before crofty to have been an invention of much later times a more modern understanding yeah essentially i think the greeks had to sort of extrapolate the idea of his death from from the fact that he was a living ruler and then later on a dead god and the greeks just sort of had to fill in the middle yeah and then it's interesting to see kind of how that then greek reinterpretation that i'll go into seems to have been kind of meshed together with the actual ancient egyptian ideas in the popular consciousness in our times yeah like because like coming into this i fully thought that the whole the whole description of the myth came from actual ancient egyptian sources that's it i i'd originally thought that as well and found out i was very wrong and it made it a bit of a difficult episode but worth it i think yep so as i've mentioned the egyptian sources are fragmentary but i don't think that's why a reference to his death directly isn't it's generally thought that directly referring to osiris death was a taboo and this does have a practical explanation in context to avoid any mention of his death as the purpose of the pyramid texts of the coffin texts of the books of the dead was to ensure that the deceased would receive an eternal afterlife and as we'll see later the pyramid texts in particular involve associating the deceased with the aspect of osiris as the resurrector and taking on that part of osiris's story and so within the logic of that having a spell that talks about osiris death would probably be seen as having a very detrimental effect on the pharaoh's chances of resurrection yeah that makes sense that's how i would explain it and how i would speculate that that taboo would come about because it to me that fits within the logic of what the text is supposed to do yeah avoid permanent death so don't mention the actual death sort of thing and so it's here that taking on osiris aspects and becoming osiris becomes important so as the spells progress the references to the deceased pharaoh changes from calling him by his name and having him take the place of osiris among the other gods to then calling him osiris or calling him osiris pharaoh so in effect to resurrect he has to become osiris take on osiris power and then return to being himself once he has ascended i'm going to use the example of the pyramid of unass who was the final pharaoh of the fifth dynasty of the old kingdom in the 24th century bc because this is the oldest known pyramid text and the most complete surviving rendition so it feels like the best one to work from for these purposes to give a little bit of background on unass he was originally thought to have ruled over a period of famine based on reliefs on the causeway of his pyramid which showed images of starving people but later findings showed similar reliefs from his ancestors time which were known to be a time of prosperity and so it was thought that those reliefs are actually more trying to show his benevolence to the poor to the nomadic peoples of the time who were generally depicted as starving and emaciated however his kingdom was known to have been in economic decline like you said before about moving into the intermediate period yeah and being seen as a time of chaos but despite this economic decline his pyramid was quite large and expensive and so whether his achievements that were depicted are true or whether it was his priests going to great lengths to falsify this more positive image of him and secure his place in the heavens we can't really be sure yeah that unfortunately is a recurring pattern amongst egyptian rules so a good example of these is as the third intermediate period was breaking out ramsay's the third commissioned like grand inscriptions depicting how incredibly well his reign had gone we get like there's a famous uh relief at karnak i think which is shows like him defeating an invasion by the sea peoples that it's led to all sorts of theories around the bronze age collapse and all that but it looks like despite his boasting and his long reign there was a general decline going on at that point so it is it is a problem you sometimes have with studying egyptian rulers is they'd like to mention all the boastful great things they did and just hide the fact that the kingdom was collapsing under the rug yeah i think that's best summed up in that um percy b shelley poem with that famous line look on my oh yeah aussie mundias yeah yeah look on my works you mighty and despair yeah so yeah but i'm digressing so within the pyramid itself as i said the walls were entirely covered in these inscribed spells although the the order is quite unclear of how they're supposed to be read the people who've translated and reconstructed them have given their order but admit that it could be incorrect but the text can at least be broken into certain themes so there are parts of the sarcophagus chamber for example that depict unass as taking the throne and the aspects of the god ruler of the world of the living and that's one of the few explicit references to osiris as ruler of the living prior to his death to quote the spell o unass you have not gone dead you have gone alive to sit on the throne of osiris your scepter is in your hand that you may give orders to the living and the handle of your lotus shaped scepter in your hand give orders to those of the mysterious sites so here the mysterious sites refer to the people who are dead and so it specifies that he starts as ruler of the living and becomes ruler of the dead the second and last line of this same spell then also associates unass with three others who have also previously held the throne of the world of the living it specifies atom the creator it specifies horus as the heir of osiris and it does also specify set as a ruler of the living which is quite interesting as the myth that we know and that you'll be discussing later does cast set as an usurper as i mentioned it associates him with chaos so it seems that despite his means of taking the throne he was still in some ways revered as having the aspect of the ruler yeah that's an odd one with an egyptian mythology i when i was reading through some of my sources i did note that there are examples of things like later pharaohs taking on part of his name as part of their various names and taking him on as a patron of sorts so it's not just a case of set within egyptian mythology is just the big bad evil guy he has a more complex nature than that and this again is another example of that being the case yeah in the greek version there is none of that subtlety by the way but we'll get into that the greeks like to be dramatic so yeah yeah yeah well as we'll talk about in the greek version he's equated by a figure who is unambiguously uh considered destructive so the next spell in the sarcophagus chamber then depicts unass as having to locate the body of osiris and in doing so he has to take on the aspects of isis and her sister nephthys who searched for his body and it states your bones are those of female hawks the goddesses who are in heaven which says isis and nephthys are later depicted there are also later references to two kites healing uness's injuries which again calls on the myth of isis and nephthys restoring osiris however that's as far as that particular reference goes to the period in which osiris was dead there are pastors following this that condemn any who would speak evil against dunas and it purifies him and delivers him to atom ray the combined aspects of two of the sun gods and it's here that we also see the first reference to the fate of anyone other than a pharaoh in death and it makes a indirect reference to the judgment of osiris in that it commands that osiris cannot do this to eunes so again i'll quote there is no seed of a god which has perished neither has he who belongs to him you will not perish who belong to him rei atom does not give you to osiris he does not reckon your heart he has no power over your breast ray atom does not give you osiris he has no power over your breast osiris you cannot have power over him your son cannot have power over him horus your father cannot have power over him so it is in no uncertain terms rejecting the idea of the pharaoh being judged as a common person and because obviously we don't in this period there aren't really any texts for the funerals of the common people this is the only way we can know that that belief of osiris judging people did go back as far as the old kingdom elsewhere in the sarcophagus chamber we see two more important references to osiris and then in the antechamber there is one reference to osiris that completes the story of unassassi's resurrection so firstly in the sarcophagus chamber we see osiris unass so here quite importantly referred to as this single combined pharaoh god figure he receives his head his eyes his teeth his heart his liver his spleen and the liquid which comes out of you from those putting him back together and he is also given the heads of the followers of set and given the eye of horus once this is done heralding the resurrection and restoration of unass there is a line that gets repeated to each god in turn referencing their relation to osiris and again associating unas reborn as being osiris so to quote the first line of that atom this is your son here osiris whom you have preserved alive he lives he lives this unass lives he is not dead this unass is not dead unass has not gone down he has not been judged he judges so again quite directly associating him with osiris there but this then ends the association of unes cyrus as you can see hunas has gone back to being referred to simply as unass and then the antechamber makes a reference instead to unass taking on the form of horus following osiris and taking the throne of the world of the living yeah that's a yeah that's an interesting one it's kind of like um to me i kind of interpret that as you know hinting at the pharaoh is kind of almost being reborn in an earthly form if he's returning to an association with horus but uh i may be missing something there i think by this point it was the form of horus who had become the sun god oh right he was supposedly sitting in the heavens beside the sun god so the depiction of him kind of taking on the role of osiris is more in the vein of osiris's rebirth rather than as you said literally becoming osiris yeah he he becomes osiris in order to be reborn but once he's been reborn he becomes unass again yeah and then takes the aspect of horus the sun god there's a few sort of scattered references that hint at the pharaohs being associated with the star and so that's how they are sat beside horus and heavens sort of thing yeah that makes sense don't don't quote me on that because i'm i might have mixed that up okay no problem so as i've mentioned the pyramid texts do miss out any direct reference to osiris's death i can only find one egyptian source that actually alludes to osiris death and that is from the cult city of abidos there is a tomb in abidos to a government official by the name of amen marseille guessing at the pronunciation yeah which is dated between 1500 and 1300 bc it might be a manmotis i'm not quite sure yeah there's definitely no s on the end of the version i saw but i could be no no uh mosc at the end is mostly yeah transliterating from hieroglyphics to latin alphabet and everything the example this is like uh how the word uh to moses is spelt for example if you look into that where it's just you think it'd be tutmos from looking at it i say this because i got it wrong in the video once fair yeah i mean we're getting used to doing that really yeah so the tomb of amen moses contained a large stone slab which is called a steely and on which it had inscribed a hymn to osiris so this hymn names the entire line of the heirs to the kings of the two lands which was the name for the gods who ruled egypt and the world of living upper and lower egypt is what they mean by the two lands yeah so it it skips atom as it specifies it's the heirs not the original and so it lists them as tar or rey [Music] osiris seth and horus the hymn briefly describes the ascension to kingship of osiris but then once he is ascended it cuts to isis specifying that she is avenging osiris and putting an end to the deeds of set before then telling of isis search for osiris remains describing isis as taking osiris as water to produce an air namely horus we can't really elaborate on that thanks to the clean tag of this podcast yeah but i think i think they could hear the air quotes don't worry yes yeah and finally it briefly describes again osiris resurrection and so again by implication of the fact that isis was avenging osiris that's probably the closest evidence of osiris murder in any of the egyptian sources so there are two other major groups of texts that i mentioned previously that feature osiris the coffin texts from the middle kingdom and the books of the dead from the new kingdom each of these covered the internment and the crossing over of the higher classes of egyptian society so priests government officials and nobility and as i mentioned before this was a matter of if you could afford it you got the afterlife yeah to give a bit of context a book of the dead was made to order by scribes it used second-hand papyrus to bring costs down but it still cost roughly half of the annual pay of a laborer oh wow yeah so yeah was generally only affordable to the elite yeah that basically just means it was not a pot it was not available to anyone other than the elite yeah that's if it costs that much yeah maybe if someone like barely ate and saved everything for his entire life yeah i didn't have a family to support and didn't have a family to support you know never went to the pub yeah sort of thing just sat instead at his wall for weekends but otherwise it wasn't happening nope so i'm not going to go too much into the main body of the coffin text or the book of the dead because if we if we were to go into the full passage through the underworld and everything we'd be here next week yeah i think i mean you've mentioned before the idea of doing your own episode on the book of the dead so yes i think it's i think at the bare minimum the book of the dead is something we can save for another episode yeah so the main aspects of the osiris myth aren't addressed very much in these two books obviously because the function was more for those who would be passing into the netherworld and passing into the realms of the dead the idea of the resurrection doesn't need to be too strongly discussed so there is essentially the bare minimum talk of osiris resurrection so as to ensure that people who were passing through the netherworld could resurrect as a mortal or could live on in the field of reeds but not not as explicit or as much repeated as we find in the pyramid texts so instead to use the most comprehensively reconstructed coffin text which was called the book of two ways it describes the passage of the deceased through the underworld in order to encounter osiris at the end of one of two paths i can't really find a clear answer as to how the choice the path is made but the fact that both of these paths are described suggest that the choice is not known until after the deceased passes into the underworld each path presents a number of dangerous creatures which the deceased must pass through and the majority of the spells are designed to grant deceased the strength to endure so to give one example which would make some great power metal lyrics i am the torch and the flame i am the spear which is in the hand which is stabbed at those who are below oh you a fire beware of me for i am the knife which pierces the middle of his head it is i who repels her and gives her to the earth gods who are in the lake geb is your protector down on your face do not frustrate his actions so if if not power metal lyrics like at least a spoken word bit at the start yeah just need a bit of a guitar riff over it and then yeah we're on our way gonna have to write that one day yeah this example i'm giving it mainly to illustrate how the gods are treated quite differently in these texts as they're treated in the pyramid texts instead of having the deceased take on the gods aspect the deceased instead calls upon the god's aid and so there is this separation between the two that you don't find with pharaohs so with the aid of these spells the dead can then reach one of the two destinations so the first destination is rostau which is on the border between the earth and the sky and is where the body of osiris rests and by looking upon the body of osiris the deceased then receives a form of eternal life in that they're reborn into the mortal world to begin again the second destination is the field of reads that i've mentioned on the way the deceased must pass through the field of offerings and prepare a meal for osiris then osiris along with anubis and thoth preside over the judgment of the deceased osiris places the heart onto a balance and with the other side of the balance holding the feather of mart like i say a symbol of order osiris then reads out to the deceased the 42 assessors of mart all of these are commandments in a similar vein to the christian ten commandments stating crimes which thou shalt not do so if a person has committed none of these crimes then they have lived within the principles of mart their heart will weigh less than the feather and they they'll be deemed were they not all of the commandments are known but they include crimes such as quarreling blasphemy defacing a god's image and acquiring dishonest wealth i also can't find out whether there was sort of a cut-off point for how many commandments must be broken in order for the weight of sin on the heart to outweigh the feather it's a bit unclear it might be that one sin is enough but it might be that there is a way to reduce the burden in a way yeah because the the automatically your mind goes to it must just be one any any sin basically but it may be more charitable than that that's it the fact that it's comparing the weight suggests that there is some sort of charitable way of reducing the burden yeah otherwise you could speed this whole process up with a yes no answer session like do you do any of these uh yes right bye it's funny you say that because [Laughter] the way that they're the deceased is judged is that they must honestly state that they have not committed each act in turn i can see yeah it's like you're almost there mate but i can see some ways of streamlining this workflow like do you do you need the heart thing with the like i know you're attached to the weigh scales but i mean it gives a pretty striking image though which yeah so at least gives us something fun to talk about yeah and so if they pass this trial and they're deemed were they and their grants eternal life peace and prosperity within the field of reeds but there is then a longer version where the deceased can go a step further and become a servant of osiris and of ra if they choose to do so they can beseech thoth to allow them to travel his paths even further into the underworld at the end of thoth's paths they must justify their actions in life before ra following that they then have to pass through a series of dark gates and meet osiris in his aspect as the resurrector who then offers them the eye of horus upon receiving the eye of horus they then have to recite the final spell in the coffin text or in the book of the dead and this allows them to become one with thoth who is described as the son of osiris and become reborn as a servant to both osiris and ra the final spell that describes this goes as follows the cough is important the cough is an important part of the spell it's a husband to replicate you've got a cough exactly the same way every single time yeah yeah you've got you've got to get that pitch perfect except quote as for anyone who knows this spell he will be like ra in the east of the sky like osiris within the netherworld and he will go down to the circle of fire there will never be a flame against him forever it has come happily to an end and i feel with that it's where we should leave the egyptian sources as i've covered just about everything that i can find from egypt that discusses osiris's myth yeah it's a it's an interesting one because it's like there are plenty of interesting tidbits in there you get quite a good idea of the general thoughts that the egyptians had regarding the afterlife and osiris role but considering we're kind of brought upon kind of greek style myths or roman style myths things along those lines you're usually used to having more of a cohesive story so i can kind of see this being less satisfying in some ways than to listen about you see why i used the jigsaw metaphor earlier yeah yeah very much so but thankfully even if the ancient egyptians themselves did not write down or leave behind that much information regarding the osiris myth and his specifically as we've encountered here much information about the circumstances of his death we're very lucky crofty that the greeks specifically the ancient greeks could not stop themselves from writing down every single thing they possibly ever heard one thing i love about the greeks yeah so we uh we do in fact have two major surviving accounts that detail osiris himself his role and his death in much more detail and that is my job today to outline so we're going to end with a more satisfying more conventional couple of narratives surrounding osiris and his death but even then these two narratives managed to disagree with each other quite significantly as we'll see so as with our earlier section before we discuss these two major accounts of the osiris myth that have been preserved by greek writers we really need to outline how the ancient greeks understood and related to egyptian religion so like many religious systems of the mediterranean during this period the greeks very much interpreted the egyptian system of worshipped of worship by comparing it to their own in quite a similar fashion tower i think a lot of people are familiar with the romans effectively incorporating much of the greek pantheon into their own religious system so in a similar light the greeks seem to have considered many of the egyptian gods that we've discussed so far today as having an equivalent version in one of their own deities so the reasons for many of these equivalencies are often a little dubious sometimes it's just the case of these gods had a similar function within greek and egyptian religion therefore they were equated together sometimes it was done on the basis of fairly dubious etymological similarities between the names of deities which i may touch upon in a little bit a good example of this though is how in greek accounts osiris is basically considered to be analogous to the figure of dionysus due to their similar role as gods who were associated with fertility and in particular because they both had similar myths in which they were considered to have been dismembered and reborn what was surprising to me is many of the earlier greek writers also seem to consider greek religion to have been largely imported from the egyptian system rather than being their own creation which is rare from the ancient greek viewpoint on these things because they did consider the egyptians to be a form of barbarians so the probably the most notable person to make this claim would be herodotus when discussing his own experiences of ancient egypt by the time we get to kind of the later greek authors that i'm going to be discussing today however attitudes towards disappears have been more mixed and in the case of at least one of the authors that i'm talking about here there were some attempts to push back against this and rearrange the greeks religion in a more hierarchy above the egyptian concepts but i'm not going to touch too much on that today we should probably also mention that these two accounts crofty likely weren't influenced purely by the versions of the osiris mythology that were interpreted and given to them by the egyptians themselves but were also probably equally influenced by the fact that by the time both of these authors were writing the various cults of the egyptian gods and goddesses had spread throughout much of the mediterranean and had been not only influenced by other deities within those regions but also directly uh synchronized with them as well so as i mentioned earlier by the first century's bc slash ads that i'm going to be talking about the course of isis in particular had become widespread throughout the roman empire as had osiris in the form of a hybrid god i'm not sure we've mentioned to this point other than when talking about our sources which was serapis so serapis was an interesting figure what he basically seems to have been is a combination of not only osiris but some elements of the apis along with greek gods such as helios hades and to some extent demeter i'm not going to go too much into his exact forms and evolution today because i want to focus on the more pure forms of osiris we have some accounts of but it is probably worth mentioning a couple of things about him so there is considerable doubt over his exact origins and what role he really played in greek attempts to kind of retailer and hellenize egyptian religion into a form that they were more comfortable with the thing is he could very much have originated prior to greek rulership over egypt so so we're talking from kind of the late 4th century bc onwards the rule of the telemike dynasty who themselves took on many aspects of egyptian culture and serapis could very much have played a role in attempts to recast religion in a form they themselves more comfortable with so his name most likely seems to have originated as part of the apis balls title which was sir apis or the foretelling apis rather than some later greek claims that it was derived directly from osiris-apus that we've outlined earlier what we do know with some certainty is that his cult was promoted by the greek ptolemaic dynasty and that his worship remained widespread throughout the mediterranean into the era of imperial rome and even as far as the coming of christianity so so widespread was either in the era of the flavian dynasty of roman emperors he appears on alongside them on some coins so he he certainly remained prominent and unsurprisingly as he was equated at least partially to osiris he took over much of osiris's role as the husband of isis and the father of horus so i'm not going to really go into any more detail on serapis today but i just thought it was worth quickly mentioning him as i doubt we're going to really come across him any future episodes we plan on doing so with all of that aside let's get to the two most complete accounts we have of the osiris myth that come down to us so these come to us respectfully from the first century bc historian theodorus securus who's probably familiar to people who've uh listened to content over on his the histocrat channel in the past as i mentioned quite a lot when as it comes to ancient roman and greek accounts of the peoples of western europe so his version comes to us from his biblioteca historica which i'm still not sure how it's supposed to be pronounced and it's a universal history that he composed the second author of note that we also have an account from is the writer philosopher and priest plutarch who was active during the first and second century's a.d and his account of the osiris myth comes from a series of essays and transcribes speeches that are attributed to him known as the moralia so the first of these we're going to focus on is theodoris's account that included as part of it an account of the histories claimed by what he considered the barbarian nations and the oldest of these he claimed to be that's of egypt so theodorus himself doesn't seem to have traveled to collect like first-hand accounts for his history he instead appears to have largely relied on composing his work using text written by other authors and that unfortunately means that his account is kind of automatically a second hand one at best it's also somewhat uncertain where his exact sources for his section on egypt come from it has been suggested that it came from the lost work of hecateus of abdurah on egypt it's very difficult to verify if that is actually the case we do have a few small surviving excerpts of hecateus as works from other authors but they're so disparate that it's difficult to make direct comparisons with theodorus it's also possible that he was working from other authors or that he was just working from a general knowledge of the egyptian cults of both isis and osiris that spread throughout the mediterranean by this point so with all these caveats in mind let's take a look at the version of the osiris myth he presents and indeed this also provides kind of a wider description of egyptian mythology from the greek perspective so according to theodorus when the men of egypt first came into existence they looked up to the firmament of the sky and they conceived two gods based on the sun and the moon respectively who they named osiris and isis according to him the name osiris means many-eyed as the rays he shed in every direction in his role as the sun allowed him to survey all the land and sea whilst the name isis simply means ancient in terms of iconography he describes osiris quite differently from the description crofty gave he basically only really describes him as wearing a cloak of foreign skin around his shoulders which he then ascribes its similarity to the starry sky at night so if you think about the the kind of spots and pattern of a thorn that does make sense theodorus also describes isis as having the horns of a cow though he claims that this is both due to them resembling the shape of the crescent moon and because the cow is held sacred to her rather than a myth that we've not really gone into aircraft e but there is another myth with an egyptian religion of basically the decapitation of isis by horus who then replaced her head with that of a cow as with other greek authors theodorus explicitly links osiris with the greek god dionysus he then goes on to explain that these two gods regulate the entire universe between them and that they generate practically all the matter that furnishes living beings generating fire and spirit from the sun wet and dry from the moon and between them both the air so according to theodorus the egyptians also venerate each of these parts as a individual deity giving the examples of how the spirit was named by them as zeus so this is going to get all confusing because he gives all of these examples of gods under the greek names and i'm using what i roughly could figure out as their equivalents in egyptian so he gives example of how the spirit was named by them as zeus so that supposedly is the god amoon the fire hephaestus which again is tar or patar the earth demeter which is difficult because you would think this is probably going to be an equivalent to geb but it's actually a little more complicated than that in fact the greeks often equated demeter to isis during this period which confuses things further and it's probably best that we just move on in addition to this he also names the wet as oceanus which presents its own difficulties because he basically equates oceanus to the nile but to the best of my knowledge i don't think the nile had an equivalent god within egyptian mythology so i know there is a god associated with the flooding of the nile but that doesn't seem to be equivalent to oceanus so again a little confusing finally he does equate the heir to someone kind of more recognizable so he gives the name of the air as athena but the egyptian equivalent to that is thought to be the goddess of neph which is the fact that they both contained various warlike aspects so theodorus goes on to say that the egyptians held that these five deities often visit the inhabited world appearing in the form of sacred animals or in the guise of men or other shapes you then immediately goes on to contradict himself and say that there are hell to be other gods that who had once been mortal some of them including the gods he has literally just described and he says that some of these gods were even kings of the egyptians in ancient times as we've hit upon earlier crofty so the list he then gives includes figures that we mentioned before which include hephaesteous as in patar cronus who i believe is analogous to geb and zeus in the form of a moon and then finally and most importantly for us osiris so this is really where the myth and mythology surrounding osiris comes into things so deodorant relates to us that as a mortal king osiris was the first figure to make mankind give up on its barbarous and wild living and in particular to give up on its cannibalism and in order to do this he devised the cultivation of wild wheat and bali the grain of which was discovered by isis alongside this isis is also said to have created the first laws which prevented the continuance of illegal violence and insurance that mankind had practiced up until this point osiris was also said to have founded the city of thebes although later on theodorus attributes this to a figure known as bucirus and as crofty mentioned in the actual egyptian accounts it's thought that osiris may have originated as a local god of the city of bucyrus so there appears to just be some mangling going on in that particular part of the account and it's also said that osiris built there a famous temple to his parents amoon and hera although i'm not quite sure who hera was the equivalent for in addition to this it was also said that osiris built golden chapels for the rest of the gods and to these chapels he appointed the first priests he was then said to have been the first to have discovered how to harvest and store grapes so that wine may be made and again this is another reason why he is considered to be equivalent to dionysius osiris is then said to have honored hermes who egyptian equivalent was fought as his councillor due to foss ingenuity upon which theodorus diverts to give a fairly lengthy list of his inventions so these include writing and the alphabet the correct offerings due to the gods music wrestling and astronomy so after establishing the affairs of egypt it was then said that osiris placed supreme power in the hands of his wife isis and his council off appointed heracles as his general then set up both bucyrus and antineus as governors over egypt so again these are all figures who don't seem to have a very clear equivalent in egyptian mythology from there osiris gathered a great army and set out to visit and pacify all the lands of wild beasts and to bring knowledge of the vine and the cultivation of bowie and wheat to all men this again very much casso cyrus in a greek mold if you folks remember back to our heracles episode the clearing of lands of wild beasts and making it appropriate for cultivation was a frequent deed accomplished by heroes within the greek pantheon so it's said that in doing so osiris hoped both to rid men of their savage ways and explicitly so that he himself may receive the honour of immortality due to the magnitude of the benefactions that he had bestowed upon mankind so what follows in theodoris account is a lengthy description of how he does just that taking the army his brother apollo who is related to horus in this example so it's probably worth me mentioning here that in neither of these two accounts is horus presented as having been born after osiris death and in this account in particular horus is not even presented as osiris son in addition to the army and horus he takes his two other sons anubis and macedon along with him the latter two of these are described as wearing a dog skin and the four parts of a wolf respectively so this is kind of where you can see the ancient egyptian iconography peeking through a little bit and theodorus claims that in doing so these two figures led to these animals being venerated by the egyptians so to summarize theodorus text quite heavily osiris succeeds in visiting all the lands of ethiopia arabia india asia and europe in phrase he slays the king of the barbarians like kyrgyz and gives up his son macedon to become the first king of macedonia finally he succeeds in visiting all of the inhabited world in turning over these lands the cultivation of barley wheat and the vine and if a country was not able to sustain the vine he bestowed upon them crafty what i think we can agree is his greatest achievement the brewing of beer from bali big fan of that yes yes definitely the the central event and culmination of everything we were talking about here and i think we can wrap up their crafty yeah oh hell is iris let's have a beer yeah let's go have a beer right so on arriving back in egypt with the gifts that he has gathered from all lands osiris then julie receives the gift of immortality and passes from the midst of men into the company of the gods so again an event that we could kind of point to has been at least somewhat similar to the life of heracles although with quite a few less twists and turns this brings me finally crofty to deodoris version of the story of osiris's death which we've only really seen hints at so far unfortunately for us it is again quite heavily summarized within his own text blutak gives us a far more expanded description so theodorus begins by telling us that the priests of osiris had considered the account of his death to be a matter best not divulged but eventually this hidden knowledge was made known to the world so that kind of jives with what we'd said earlier about how one of the reasons why some elements of the egyptian account of osiris death may not have come down to us so according to theodorus this summarized story goes as follows whilst osiris was ruling as king of egypt he was murdered by his brother typhon who the greeks considered to be the equivalent to the egyptian god of set so as i mentioned earlier this version of typhon seems to have much less of the subtleties of set in ancient egyptian religion in that we know from our description of typhon in one of the dragons episodes that we did back last year is that he is basically a destructive entity that contends with zeus and that's very much the vein and depiction of set that we get in theodorus text so the actual description of this is very brief we are told that set after slaying osiris dismembered his body into 26 pieces and gave one portion to each of the band of murderers that he led in order to secure their loyalty isis then avengers osiris murder alongside horus and here horus is confusingly described as their son so it's possible that horus is two different figures in this account and the two of them slay set or typhon after which isis becomes queen over egypt rather than horus isis then proceeds to recover all the parts of the body except for the phallus or the privates which typhon we are told has thrown into the nile as none of his followers were willing to take it wishing that her husband's burial place would remain secret but still be honored by the people of egypt we are told that isis then fashioned a figure made of both wax and spices the size of osiris over each of these body parts she then gives one of these figures each to a different group of priests and tells them that they alone have been given the role of burying osiris within their district at the same time she exhorted them to select an animal native to their district and to venerate it in life with the honours formally rendered to osiris and to provide it with the same type of funeral after its death so the result of all of this is that each one of these groups of priests and their respective temples claimed until the days of theodorus himself that osiris was buried within their district and that these animals continued to be revered so this very much to me seems to be theodorous explanation as to why osiris was widely revered throughout different parts of egypt and then in addition to this he also claims that the sacred bulls of egypt that we've touched upon which were consecrated to osiris in later periods which are the apis and the minerva's bulls which basically were considered his physical manifestations on earth and were treated carefully and ritually as a result were also generally worshipped amongst the egyptians due to their important role in agricultural labor so that's largely the relevant parts of theodorus account towards osiris and the osiris-myth we do get some further elaboration on osiris's myth and his death in the works of plutarch so plutarch presents us with a few difficulties that we don't really encounter with theodorus so most people are probably familiar with him through his series of biographies of roman and greek figures known as the parallel lives that comprised his major work during his later life for this particular myth we're more interested in his essay on isis on osiris which is part of his earlier major body of works that is at least attributed to him which is the moralia so the major thing that we need to take into account when discussing plutarch's version of the myth is that the point of this essay is not to relate accurate religious history it's more philosophical in nature so plutarch himself was a follower of plato he he lived during a period of platonic thought known as middle platonism i'm not really going to go into that as a philosophy because i'm an ignorant when it comes to philosophy and trying to read about that particular um and trying to read about that particular school philosophy left me more confused anything else i would however recommend a pretty good video on the topic by uh the channel philosophytube i think is an introduction to plato's school of thoughts i found that very helpful so despite the fact that plutat by all accounts was using egyptian religion here really more as an attempt to explain an earlier platonic work uh so plato's work to mass and to express his own concepts of the world and the cosmos modern historians do generally think that he managed to provide a decent overview and account of egyptian religious practices even if that wasn't his actual intention to do so so in terms of the sources he drew upon it's likely that he actually was drawing up on his own account here because we do know that plutarch despite spending large portions of his life as a priest at the temple of delphi he did in fact visit egypt himself that being said where in egypt he picked up his sources for osiris is a little confusing because we know the fact that he couldn't read hieroglyphics and he doesn't seem to have spoken the more vernacular language of egypt of the time so it's likely he got his account from the greek residence of the city of alexandria again he may also have relied on some earlier works such as those as herodotus theodorus and the author alien along with the wider worship of both isis and serapis within the empire of his time so that in particular is supported by the fact that inscriptions to both of those deities have been found in his hometown of and i'm going to butcher this cheironia his essay isis and osiris is addressed to his friend the priestess clear who appears to have been a fairly high-ranking priestess at delphi the first section of it largely discusses the habits of egyptian priests which includes details such as explaining why they choose to shave their heads and wear linen garments i'm going to skip past that here for the sake of brevity it's also during the course of this initial section he makes a couple of claims so he repeats the claim that set after osiris death rent his body into multiple pieces but what's probably relevant for us is he says that not all priests believe this story and some of them claim it to be a misrepresentation he also repeats theodorus claim that some hold the name osiris to mean many eyed claiming that os in the egyptian language means many and irie means i although many of his claims regarding the etymology of words are foreign modern historians to be incredibly dubious it's also in the section that he makes the fairly radical claim that isis is a greek word rather than an egyptian one and it's fought to be this is part of his attempts to kind of recast uh egyptian religion to be at least somewhat not necessarily just derivative of greek religion but at least arranged in a hierarchy below greek religion so getting into the main body of what he says about osiris after warning uh claire that she should not think that the traditional stories given by the egyptians regarding the gods and their wanderings literally happened he goes on to dispel a few different myths about uh what the egyptians are said to believe and then he recounts what really is the fullest version of the osiris myth we have that has survived so in his own words plutarch claims that he relates this account in the briefest manner possible with the admission of everything that is quote merely unprofitable or superfluous so one thing we also need to keep in mind these sources can be more trouble than they're worth sometimes one of the things we have to keep into account here is that plutarch really isn't trying to relate an unbiased account here what he's basically attempting to do is to cleanse the account of what he considers barbarian elements so later in the essay he even relates to us some examples of these stories that he has chosen to omit which include the dismembering of horus and the previously mentioned decapitation of isis so he relates to us how osiris traveled over the entire earth and civilized the peoples he found there needing no weapon to do so but instead through the use of his natural charm and knowledge of music according to plutarch whilst osiris was away doing this and he'd left isis in control of the land set made no attempt to overthrow the order of things due to her diligence however as soon as osiris has returned home sec conspires against him gathering a group of some 72 conspirators and secures the aid of the queen of ethiopia so seth's plan having secretly measured osiris body which in my notes i have the word how written next to because i don't know about you crafty life if i was given the task crafty i have to measure your body exactly um not sure how i would go about doing that yeah i think i'd notice yeah even if you tried him if i tried to in my sleep he'd wake me up yeah exactly it's hard to do exactly but we're probably leading to probably reading too literally into this myth yeah it is greeks there were a few weird things going on you just gotta roll with it yeah so seth having exactly measured osiris body somehow in secret repairs a magnificent chest that exactly matches him in shape then has it brought into the room when a festivity was in progress so as the whole company present at the festivities admire this chest set jestingly promises that he would give this chest to any man who exactly fitted its length after the whole group had attempted to lie down in it and none of them having found that it matched his length osiris does so at which point the conspirators slam the chest shut fasten it using nails and molten lead and then carry it off to the nile where they throw it into the water and we are told the chest is then washed out into the sea what is perhaps interesting here crofty is that plutarch at no point as far as i can tell actually refers to actually refers to osiris as having died during this whole process he simply is locked in this chest thrown into the nile and then he's sort of described as if he's dead from that point onwards that's a odd one you'd have thought the greeks wouldn't have had that same sort of taboo that we discussed over killing him yeah i mean it does kind of suggest to me that maybe the egyptian attitude towards describing death seems to have carried over there somewhat yeah maybe so when the tidings of what has happened reach isis she cuts off her tresses and puts on a garment of mourning then wanders everywhere to her wit's end searching for the chest after asking everyone she meets on her travels of its location she meets with some little children who admit to having seen the chest and inform her of the mouth of the river where they have seen it so it is here that we learn that osiris had in fact previously cavorted with her sister who is the egyptian goddess nephes who in this version is actually the wife of set and osiris who had believed her to be his wife has in fact managed to sire a son with her so similar to the exposure in some accounts of heracles nephes is so worried that set will discover what has happened that she immediately exposes this infant out in the nile delta but isis rescues the child with the help of dogs that lead her to it and she goes on to bring up this child to be her guardian and due to the association with dogs i just mentioned this child comes to be named anubis then in a slightly confusing passage isis learns that the chest has been cast up from the sea near the land of biblius which i'm guessing means the city of biblos in modern lebanon which was an ancient uh phoenician city so we are told that where the chest has come to rest a magnificent tree grows up around it and draws the admiration of the local king who is a man named mal sander who cuts off the portion that contains the chest and uses it as a pillar in his house isis then arrives in biblos and sits down by a spring where she meets the queen of biblica's maidservants and manages to befriend them by plaiting their hair and imparting a wondrous fragrance upon them so jealous of her maidservants the queen longs to meet with isis and to engage her services and has her summoned whereupon she quickly comes to trust her and makes isis the nurse of her baby so rather than nursing the babe isis instead gives it her finger to suckle upon and she takes the time to burn away the mortal portions of its body with the goal of making it immortal so whilst this is all going on isis also turns herself into a swallow and we are told she flits about the pillar containing osiris body wailing in lament so the queen who it turns out has been watching gives out a cry on seeing her baby consumed with fire at which point isis seizes her acts and reveals to the queen her true nature as a goddess and we are told that in interrupting isis the queen inadvertently robs her child of immortality that sounds familiar yes yes achilles yeah a certain mr achilles [Music] so isis then asks for the pillar which the queen agrees to and she cuts away the wood from around the chest soaks it in perfume and entrusts it to the people of biblus where we are told that it is venerated to this day isis then throws herself on the chest with such a whale that the younger of the king's two sons immediately drops dead on the spot however isis does not suffer any ramifications for this and she loads the chest onto a boat takes the elder of the king's two sons with her and puts out to sea so upon gaining her first moment of seclusion from all others she opens up the chest and caresses the face of the body within as she is doing so however the king's eldest son comes up behind her and plutarch relates two possible versions of what then happens one is that the child then also drops dead from the power of isis's angry glare being disturbed or that this is a misinterpretation and the child did in fact fall overboard and drown but both versions are fairly grim we have to say isis then proceeds to find her son horus who we are told is reared at the site of bhuto which i think is analogous with the ancient egyptian city of per wadjet which again i'm butchering the pronunciation of and she hides the chest there unfortunately for her however set who is out hunting by night comes across the chest and upon recognizing the body inside he divides it not into the 26 pieces that were reported to us by deodoris but into 14 parts and scatters them throughout the land so plutarch then tells us that this is the source much like theodorus did of osiris's many different tombs as osiris travels throughout the land searching for the parts and holds a funeral for each part that she found he also repeats a version of deodorance's tale that she in fact gave effigies of osiris to many different cities but in this case she does so in order to trick set as this way he is unable to find osiris's real tomb another reason that plutarch gives for this which again is similar to theodorus is that by doing this it allows her husband to receive honours from as many different cities as possible and then eventually isis finds all different parts of osiris's body except for his phallus which had been tossed into the sea where we are told the sea bream and the pike had fed upon it who attacked then tells us that it is for this reason that the ancient egyptians avoided using either of these fish so in conclusion we hear that osiris came to horus from the afterlife and exercised and trained him to do battle with seth and as part of this he asks horus what he held to be the most noble of things horus replies the most noble things is to avenge his parents for the wrongs done to them and osiris is pleased and asks him what the most useful item is to take into battle horus then surprises osiris by replying that a horse is the most useful thing to take into battle rather than osiris's suggestion of a lion as a horse can be used to cut off a fleeing enemy upon hearing this osiris realizes that horus is ready to face set around the same time many of the peoples of egypt transfer their allegiance to set along with seth's concubine of pharys who we are told is pursued by a serpent horus men slay the serpent and then plutarch tells us that in memory of this people in egypt will throw down a rope in their midst and chop it up ritually so finally horus and seth do battle and after many days horus prevails upon delivering set to isis in chains however isis decides that set will not be put to death and horus unable to accept this wrestles the royal diadem from her head he then replaces it with a helmet similar to the head of a cow which basically appears to be plutarch's way of sanitizing the story of horus decapitating isis of its perceived barbarian elements and then the very last thing we are told in plutarch's uh outlining of this is that seth was overcome in two more battles by horus and that osiris consorted with isis again after his death resulting in the birth of the god hippocrates who unfortunately due to the manner of his birth was born untimely and was forever weak in his lower limbs so crafty that was very much the greek version of osiris's life and the osiris myth i think was safe to say it differs quite significantly from some of the elements that we get from the fragmentary accounts seen in egyptian texts and significantly it kind of focuses more on osiris's deeds in life than it does in his role in the afterlife yeah i'd say so and are you sure that that bit about osiris training horus are you sure that was plutarch and not george lucas because that that's the only image i could get in my mind as you were saying the ghost of a cyrus trained horus well crofty so i think ending with that particular account gives people a relatively full idea then so from the greek accounts there we have a outlining of osiris's life and mostly of his death and then the egyptian accounts do kind of let us then fill in his role in the afterlife yes i think between the two of us this is about as full and account as we can get from the historical sources it's yeah much like this podcast it's a bit cobble together yeah yeah yeah but it's something yeah it's so i think you folks can probably tell we're both a little worse for where both before this podcast was mentioned and i'm feeling a bit grim now that we've completed it so i i'm probably gonna go and lie down i think i'm have a drink yeah exactly yeah celebrate osiris in the traditional manner yes all right folks thank you for listening um hopefully that wasn't too much of a struggle for you to get through as it was for us and uh crofty whereabouts do we reckon we're going to be visiting next time well we're going to head back to europe to a place that some might know as walekia but it does have a more common name i'm not sure whether we should keep a secret or not and let people guess let's just say that it is adjacent to a former ruler of that area who was known for his love of a certain impaling action but as we're probably going to learn that slot tradition runs a lot older than just him all right folks take care see ya

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 84,062

Keywords: Mythology podcast, mythology documentary, ancient egyptian history documentary, osiris documentary, ancient egyptian history podcast, osiris and isis, ancient egyptian mythology, egyptian mythology, ancient egyptian mythology documentary, the histocrat

Id: 1_AD0JdoCmc

Length: 120min 7sec (7207 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022