Set, as I have already said, is the Sutu or Bedâwi. He was adored elsewhere than in Egypt; the Moabites called themselves his children (Num. xxiv. 17), and in the cuneiform texts Sutu-sar (“Sutu the king”) and Nabu-rabê (“Nebo the great”) are described as twins.(141) But in Egypt he represented the population which had been conquered by the Pharaonic Egyptians or continued to live on the desert frontiers of the country, and which was stronger in the Delta than in the south. The old struggle, therefore, between light and darkness, order and confusion, which formed the background of Babylonian mythology, became the struggle which was waged for such long centuries, first between the Pharaonic Egyptians and the neolithic races, then between the kingdoms of the south and north, and finally between the united monarchy and the Bedâwin of the desert or assailants from Asia. Where the foreign element prevailed, Set was an honoured god; where the ruling Egyptian was dominant, his place was taken by his brother and his antagonist. It has been thought that the struggle between Horus and Set typified the struggle that is ever going on between the desert and the cultivated land. But such an idea is far too abstract to have formed the basis of an Egyptian religious myth. It might have been elaborated subsequently by some theological school out of the contrast between the Sutu of the desert and the god of the agriculturists; but it could never have been there originally. The interpretation is as little justifiable as that which sees in Osiris the seed that is buried in the ground. It is indeed true that the Egyptians of a later period, when the Osirian doctrine of the Resurrection was fully developed, found an analogy to it in the seed that is sown in order to grow again. The tomb of Ma-her-pa-Ra, the fan-bearer of Amon-hotep II. of the Eighteenth Dynasty, discovered by M. Loret in the valley of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, contains a proof of this. In it was a rudely-constructed bed with a mattress, on which the figure of Osiris had been drawn. On this earth was placed, and in the earth grains of corn had been sown. The corn had sprouted and grown to the height of a few inches before it had withered away. But such symbolism is, like the similar symbolism of Christianity, the result of the doctrine of the resurrection and not the origin of it. It is not till men believe that the human body can rise again from the sleep of corruption, that the growth of the seed which has been buried in the ground is invoked to explain and confirm their creed. How came this doctrine of the resurrection to be attached to the cult of Osiris and to become an integral part of Egyptian belief? There is only one answer that can be given to this: the doctrine of the resurrection was a necessary accompaniment of the practice of mummification, and Osiris was a mummified god.