This may have been occasioned by her city having maintained closer relationships than the southern towns with Bûto and Mendes, or by her priests having come to recognise a fundamental agreement between their theology and that of Egypt. In any case, it was at Byblos that the most marked and numerous, as well as the most ancient, examples of borrowing from the religions of the Nile were to be found. The theologians of Byblos imagined that the coffin of Osiris, after it had been thrown into the sea by Typhon, had been thrown up on the land somewhere near their city at the foot of a tamarisk, and that this tree, in its rapid growth, had gradually enfolded within its trunk the body and its case. King Malkander cut it down in order to use it as a support for the roof of his palace: a marvellous perfume rising from it filled the apartments, and it was not long before the prodigy was bruited abroad. Isis, who was travelling through the world in quest of her husband, heard of it, and at once realised its meaning: clad in rags and weeping, she sat down by the well whither the women of Byblos were accustomed to come every morning and evening to draw water, and, being interrogated by them, refused to reply; but when the maids of Queen Astartê* approached in their turn, they were received by the goddess in the most amiable manner--Isis deigning even to plait their hair, and to communicate to them the odour of myrrh with which she herself was impregnated. * Astartê is the name taken by the queen in the Phoenician version: the Egyptian counterpart of the same narrative substituted for it Nemanous or Saôsis; that is to say, the two principal forms of Hathor--the Hermopolitan Nahmâûît and the Heliopolitan lûsasît. It would appear from the presence of these names that there must have been in Egypt two versions at least of the Phoenician adventures of Isis--the one of Hermopolitan and the other of Heliopolitan origin.