To this foundation, however, there must have been added a myth conceived by a race in possession of a much higher degree of culture and greater imaginative powers than any with which the predynastic or protodynastic Egyptians can be credited. The earliest gods of Egypt of whom we have any record were, as we have seen, either animals or inanimate objects, a fact which is sufficiently explained by their totemic origin[124]. But spread throughout the basin of the Mediterranean, we find from the earliest times the worship of a god who was from his birth never anything but a man and a man who suffered a veritable death and passion before his resurrection and deification. Thus, in Crete we have the legend of the infant Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, who was treacherously seized by the earth-born Titans, torn in pieces, and devoured, but was afterwards reborn as Dionysos to reign over gods and men[125]. So, too, in Cyprus, Syria, and Phoenicia, we hear of Adonis, the lover of Aphrodite, done to death by the boar’s tusk, but returning yearly from the shades to spend part of the year with his mistress. In Asia Minor, again, was told the story of Atys, lover of Cybele, mother of the gods, who fatally mutilated himself in a fit of madness, but after death was resuscitated, and thereafter reigned with Cybele over all Nature. All these three legends bear too close a resemblance to that of Osiris for the four to have grown up independently, and although the point is not free from doubt, it is improbable that Egypt was the source from which the others were derived[126]. No direct connection in ancient times can be traced between Egypt and the inland country of Phrygia, which seems to be the birthplace of the majority of these legends; while it is of great importance to remember that Isis, Osiris’ queen and sister, is represented in the early Egyptian myths as merely a magician or witch cunning in spells[127], whereas in the Phrygian and Syrian legends the consort of the dying god is the “mother of all living” or in other words Nature herself. It seems therefore probable that the legend of Osiris, like so many other things in Egypt, was African as to its body, but Asiatic or European as to its head.