Lecture VII. Osiris And The Osirian Faith. 155
seed which has been buried in the ground is invoked to explain
and confirm their creed.
How came this doctrine of the resurrection to be attached to
the cult of Osiris and to become an integral part of Egyptian
belief? There is only one answer that can be given to this: the
doctrine of the resurrection was a necessary accompaniment of
the practice of mummification, and Osiris was a mummified god.
We have already seen that old Babylonian hymns describe [168]
Asari or Merodach as the god“who raises the dead to life.”
We have also seen that Osiris was not the only mummified god
known in Egypt. Pta%of Memphis was also a mummy; so
too was the mummified Horus of Nekhen, who was worshipped
even in the Delta in the“Arabian”nome of Goshen on the
borders of Asia. Whether or not the practice of embalming first
originated at Nekhen, where it was discovered that bodies buried
in the nitrogenous soil of El-Kab were preserved undecayed, it is
certain that, like the art of writing, it characterised the Pharaonic
Egyptians from the earliest times. In no other way can we
explain the existence among them of their mummified gods. But
its adoption by the older races who still formed the bulk of the
people was but gradual. It did not become universal before the
age of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
It was not, however, the bulk of the people, but the ruling
classes, who worshipped Osiris, and among whom his cult spread
and grew. He became for them Un-nefer,“the good being,”ready
to heal for them even the pains of death, and to receive them
in his realm beyond the grave, where life and action would be
restored to them. The sun shone there as it did here, for was
not Osiris himself a sun-god? the fields of the blessed were like
those of Egypt, except that no sickness or death came near them,
that no blight ever fell on fruit or corn, that the Nile never failed,
and that the heat was always tempered by the northern breeze.
The“field of Alu,”the Elysion of the Greeks, was at first in
the marshes of the Delta near the mouths of the Nile, like the