himself with horse, fought three desperate battles with Set, many of whose followers came over to him. But, although he defeated his foe, he did not put an end to his existence, and Set still lives, haunting the deserts and wild places, and even, according to one variant of the story, ruling for a time over the south of Egypt (or perhaps only a part of it), while the sway of Horus over the north remained unchallenged. As for the other gods of the cycle, Nephthys, the twin sister and reflection of Isis, was the wife of Set, but preferred to throw in her lot with Osiris, by whom she had a son, Anubis the jackal, the messenger of Osiris, who possessed many of the attributes of the Greek Hermes. So, too, Thoth, the ibis, was the judge who pronounced, or perhaps merely recorded, the final partition or arrangement between Horus and Set, and most of the other members of the Egyptian Pantheon were brought into the cycle one way or the other. This is the legend of Osiris, as we find it in the tract _de Iside et Osiride_, which is generally attributed to Plutarch and was certainly written in the first century A.D. It has not been met with earlier in a connected form; but its main incidents are sufficiently corroborated by the monuments of the time to convince us that it fairly represents the popular belief of the Egyptians during the Ptolemaic period[120]. Plutarch, or the writer who assumed his name, gives us more than one explanation of it coupled with analogies drawn from other mythologies, which exhibit considerable archaeological knowledge and show us how far the comparative study of religions had proceeded even in his time. When he fails, it is generally from lack of acquaintance with the earlier forms of the religions of Egypt, which had evidently become in those days as much a mystery to the priests as to their flocks, and which the labours of modern Egyptologists have but recently begun to recover for us. Looked at by their light, and stripped of its many transparent inconsistencies and anachronisms, it seems plain that the story is not simple but compound, and represents an attempt to fuse together the religious ideas either of different peoples or of the same people at different stages of culture[121]. In the first place, we see in it the animal gods of Egypt—Horus the falcon, Set the unknown animal or _scha_ sacred to him, Anubis the jackal, and Thoth the ibis—whom we now know to have been the totems or rallying-signs of the different tribes who invaded Egypt, probably from other parts of Africa, in predynastic times. The _Sches-Hor_ or Followers of Horus are so often alluded to in early dynastic texts that there can be no doubt that the tribe who had the falcon for their banner were originally the royal or leading tribe of these invaders. The memory of this fact was preserved in the custom, going back to the beginning of the Ist Dynasty, which assigned to the ruler of Egypt on his coronation a special name differing from that by