Lecture VII. Osiris And The Osirian Faith. 151
older population of the valley of the Nile. The reason of this is not
far to seek. Set or Sut, like Sati, denotes the Semitic or African
nomad of the desert, the Babylonian Sutu. He is the equivalent of
the Bedâwi of to-day, who still hovers on the Egyptian borders,
and between whom and the fellah there is perpetual feud. The
same cause which made Horus the brother and yet the enemy of
Set must have been at work to place Osiris in the same relation to
him. Osiris too must have typified the Pharaonic Egyptian, and
like Horus have been the first of the Pharaohs. Hence his human
body, and hence also the confusion between himself and Horus,
which ended in making Horus his son and in generating a new
Horus—Horus the younger—by the side of the older Horus of
the Egyptian faith.^137
The position of Osiris in respect to Anher is now clear. He is
the sun-god after his setting in the west, when he has passed to
the region of the dead in the underworld. He stands, therefore,
in exactly the same relation to Anher that the mummified hawk
stands to the Horus-hawk. The one belongs to the city of the
living, the other to the city of the dead. But they are both the
same deity under different forms, one of which presides over the
city, the other over its burying-ground. Like Horus, Osiris must
have been a sun-god of the Pharaonic Egyptians, but a sun-god [164]
who was connected for some special reason with the dead.^138
Now Mr. Ball has drawn attention to the fact that there was
a Sumerian god who had precisely the same name as Osiris,
and that this name is expressed in both cases by precisely the
same ideographs.^139 The etymology of the name has been sought
in vain in Egyptian. But the cuneiform texts make it clear.
(^137) The origin of the name of Set had already been forgotten in the age of the
Pyramid texts, where it is explained by the determinativeset,“a stone.”
(^138) When the hieroglyphic name of the Busirite nome was first invented, Osiris
was still the living“lord of Daddu”rather than the mummified patron of its
necropolis, since it represents him as a living Pharaoh with the title ofânzor
“chieftain.”
(^139) Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xii. 8, pp. 401-402.