Book Description

2024 Hardcover Reprint of 1911 Edition Originally Published in Two Volumes and Now Bound into One. New introduction by Jane Harrison. Two volumes bound in one. In this book E. A. Wallis Budge, one of the world's foremost Egyptologists, focuses on Osiris as the single most important Egyptian deity. In Ancient Egyptian mythology, Osiris was the god of the beyond whose death and resurrection brought a guarantee of an afterlife to mortals. He was a kindly Pharaoh, teaching agriculture, music, arts, and religion to his people. Jealous of his successful reign, his brother Seth killed him with the help of many accomplices and took control of Egypt. However, Seth's reign was foreshortened by Isis's great love for her husband and brother Osiris, whom she brought back from the dead. Osiris and Isis then conceived Horus, their beloved son. Seth, seething in anger, killed Osiris once again, this time by cutting his body to pieces and throwing them into the Nile River. Isis, with the help of Anubis, the god with the jackal head, reconstituted Osiris's body with bandages and embalming rites, thus creating the first mummy. During this act, the god Thoth recited an incantation. Finally, Horus avenged his father Osiris in a bloody duel with Seth in which Horus lost his eye, which was then given as a food offering to Osiris. This is the most thorough explanation ever offered of Osirism. With rigorous scholarship, going directly to numerous Egyptian texts, making use of the writings of Herodotus, Diodorus, Plutarch and other classical writers, and of more recent ethnographic research in the Sudan and other parts of Africa, Budge examines every detail of the cult of Osiris. He also establishes a link between Osiris worship and African religions.