The religions of ancient Egypt and BabyloniaSayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Religion
The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia
Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Assyro-Babylonian religion; Egypt -- Religion
It was the armies of Set that were driven by Horus and his metal-bearing
followers from one end of Egypt to the other, and finally overcome.(136)
Set therefore represents in the legend the older population of the valley
of the Nile. The reason of this is not far to seek. Set or Sut, like Sati,
denotes the Semitic or African nomad of the desert, the Babylonian Sutu.
He is the equivalent of the Bedâwi of to-day, who still hovers on the
Egyptian borders, and between whom and the fellah there is perpetual feud.
The same cause which made Horus the brother and yet the enemy of Set must
have been at work to place Osiris in the same relation to him. Osiris too
must have typified the Pharaonic Egyptian, and like Horus have been the
first of the Pharaohs. Hence his human body, and hence also the confusion
between himself and Horus, which ended in making Horus his son and in
generating a new Horus—Horus the younger—by the side of the older Horus of
the Egyptian faith.(137)
The position of Osiris in respect to Anher is now clear. He is the sun-god
after his setting in the west, when he has passed to the region of the
dead in the underworld. He stands, therefore, in exactly the same relation
to Anher that the mummified hawk stands to the Horus-hawk. The one belongs
to the city of the living, the other to the city of the dead. But they are
both the same deity under different forms, one of which presides over the
city, the other over its burying-ground. Like Horus, Osiris must have been
a sun-god of the Pharaonic Egyptians, but a sun-god who was connected for
some special reason with the dead.(138)
Now Mr. Ball has drawn attention to the fact that there was a Sumerian god
who had precisely the same name as Osiris, and that this name is expressed
in both cases by precisely the same ideographs.(139) The etymology of the
name has been sought in vain in Egyptian. But the cuneiform texts make it
clear. Osiris (As-ar) is the Asari of ancient Babylonia, who was called
Merodach by the Semites, and whose ordinary title is “the god who does
good to man.” The name of Asari is written with two ideographs, one of
which denotes “a place” and the other “an eye,” and the forms of the two
ideographs, as well as their meanings, are identical with those of the
hieroglyphic characters which represent Osiris. Such a threefold agreement
cannot be accidental: both the name and the mode of writing it must have
come from Babylonia. And what makes the agreement the stronger is the fact
that the ideographs have nothing to do with the signification of the name
itself; they express simply its pronunciation. In the Sumerian of early
Babylonia the name signified “the mighty one.”(140)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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