Lecture VII. Osiris And The Osirian Faith. 145
within the confines of Egypt.
It would seem, therefore, that Professor Maspero is right in
holding that Osiris was primarily the god of Busiris in the Delta.
It is the only nome of which he was formally the presiding
deity, under the title of Ânz, “the king,”and it bordered on
Hermopolis, which was dedicated to the ibis-god Thoth, who
is so closely connected with the story of Osiris.^129 To the
north stood the temple of Isis-Rennet,^130 to the south-west was
Pharbæthos (Horbêt), which worshipped Set, while Horus was
the god of many of the neighbouring nomes. The whole cycle of
Osirian deities is thus to be found within the confines of a small
tract of the Delta. [157]
The name Busiris means simply “the place of Osiris.”
Primitively it had been called Daddu,“the two colonnades,”^131
and Osiris became known as its lord. It was under this title that he
was incarnated in the ram of the neighbouring town of Mendes
on the eastern boundary of Hermopolis. The ram became his
soul; all the more easily since the Egyptian words for“ram”and
“soul”had the same or a similar pronunciation. At Dendera it is
said that in the ram of Mendes Osiris grew young again; and in
the later days of solar syncretism the four souls of Ra and Osiris,
of Shu and Khepera, were united in its body. How far back this
identification of the god and the sacred animal may reach we do
not know. But it is significant that it was not at Daddu itself, but
at a neighbouring city, that the animal was worshipped, though
(^129) The bronze figures of the ibis found at Tel el-Baqlîya, on the east bank of
the Damietta branch of the Nile, opposite Abusir or Busiris, have shown that it
is the site of the capital of the Hermopolite nome.
(^130) At Be%bêt near Mansûra.
(^131) This, at least, is how the name is usually written. But on an early seal-
cylinder which I have published in theProc. SBA., Feb. 1898, No. 2, where we
read,“The city of the ram, the city which is called Dad,”the name is written
D-d, and on a libation-table of the Sixth Dynasty from El-Kab we findDad-d-u
(Quibell,El-Kab, pl. iv. 1). The earlier pronunciation of the name as found in
the Pyramid texts is Zaddu or Zadu.