Lecture VII. Osiris And The Osirian Faith. 149
between sky and earth was merged into the god of the sun. But
it was not only at This that Anher was worshipped. He was also [161]
the god of Sebennytos, which adjoined the Busirite nome, and
where, therefore, the human sun-god was in immediate contact
with the human god of the dead. What the mummy was to the
living man, that Osiris was to Anher.^134
The double relation between Osiris and Anher in both Lower
and Upper Egypt cannot be an accident. Osiris became the god
of Abydos, because Abydos was the cemetery of This, whose
feudal god was Anher. The relation that existed in the Delta,
between Anher the sun-god of Sebennytos, and Osiris the god of
the dead at Busiris, was transferred also to Southern Egypt.
Whom or what did Osiris originally represent? To this many
answers have been given. Of late Egyptologists have seen in him
sometimes a personification of mankind, sometimes the river
Nile, sometimes the cultivated ground. After the rise of the solar
school of theology the Egyptians themselves identified him with
the sun when it sinks below the horizon to traverse the dark
regions of the underworld. Horus the sun-god of morning thus
became his son, born as it were of the sun-god of night, and
differing from his father only in his form of manifestation.^135 [162]
in the Cairo Museum,“Horus of Nekhen”is identified with Osiris (Recueil
de Travaux, xiv. p. 22, No. xx.). In the inscriptions of the Pyramid of Pepi
II.{FNS, lines 864-5, it is said that Isis and Nebhât wept for Osiris at Pe along
with“the souls of Pe.”Pe with its temple of the younger Horus, and Dep with
its temple of Uazit the goddess of the north, together formed the city called
Buto by the Greeks.
(^134) The title borne by Osiris at Abydos was Khent-amentit,“the ruler of the
west.”There is no need of turning the title into a separate god who was
afterwards identified with Osiris: he was as much Osiris as was Neb-Daddu,
“the lord of Daddu.”Professor Maspero says with truth that“Khent-amentit
was the dead Anher, a sun which had set in the west”(Études de Mythologie
et d'Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 24)—or rather, perhaps, a sun that was
setting in the west, as his domain was the necropolis of Omm el-Ga'ab,
immediately eastward of the western boundary of hills. When“Osiris of
Daddu”is distinguished from“Khent-Amentit of Abydos,”as on a stela of the