Isis Gathers the Scattered Osiris

She cut off a single lock of her hair and put on the clothes of a widow, and then she went looking. The place where she began was later called Coptos, and the man she was looking for was her husband and her brother both, a murdered king whose body had gone out of Egypt on the water. Nobody would tell her where. She questioned everyone she met, walking up and down the length of the land, and in the end it was little children playing by the river who pointed and told her which mouth of the Nile the thing had drifted out by. This is how the longest search in Egyptian myth opens, and it is worth saying at the outset that no ancient scribe ever wrote it down from beginning to end. What follows is stitched from two very different cloths.

Two cloths, one seam

The story most people carry in their heads goes like this: Set murdered Osiris, chopped him into fourteen pieces, and scattered them across Egypt, and Isis and her sister Nephthys wandered the country gathering the parts. It is a good story, and it is a modern composite, with the seam running right down the middle of it.

On one side is the native Egyptian material, the oldest of it carved into the burial chambers of Old Kingdom pyramids around 2350 BCE, some nineteen centuries before Herodotus, the first Greek to write about Egypt at length, and nearly two and a half thousand years before Plutarch. In these texts Osiris is not chopped into a counted number of pieces. He is felled, thrown down at a place called Nedit, drowned in the water, and his two sisters find him and gather his limbs and make him whole. There is no tally.

On the other side is Plutarch, a Greek priest writing around 100 CE, who gives us the chest, the foreign coast, the dismemberment, and the famous number: fourteen. A second Greek, Diodorus, writing earlier, gives a different number, twenty-six, one piece for each of Set’s accomplices. The count belongs to the Greeks, and they cannot even agree on it. The two sisters searching together belong to the Egyptians. Welding them into one tale, the two sisters gathered the fourteen pieces, is a modern harmonisation that no single ancient text supports. It is a better story with the seam left visible.

Measured in secret for a beautiful box

In Plutarch’s telling the murder is a confidence trick. Set, whom the Greeks called Typhon, gathers seventy-two conspirators and a queen of Ethiopia named Aso, and he has his brother’s body secretly measured. Then he builds a chest to those exact dimensions, a beautiful thing, richly worked, and brings it to a banquet. He offers it as a gift to whoever fits inside it.

The guests climb in one by one and none of them fits, because it was never made for them. When Osiris lies down in it the length is perfect, and the conspirators rush the lid, nail it shut, pour molten lead along the seams, and carry the sealed coffer down to the river. It goes out to sea by the Tanaitic mouth of the Nile. Plutarch even dates it: the seventeenth of the month Athyr, the sun entering the Scorpion, in the twenty-eighth year of Osiris’s reign.

The Egyptian sources know nothing of a fitted box. Their account of the death is blunter and older. His brother, the god Seth, murdered him and threw his corpse into the water, runs the prose that prefaces the Great Hymn to Osiris. The mortuary spells locate the killing at Nedit, on a riverbank: Set felled him to the earth in Nedit. No craftsmanship, no measuring, no lead. Just a brother struck down by a brother and left by the water, which is where the search begins in both traditions even as everything around it differs.

Nursing a foreign prince by night

The chest, in Plutarch, does not sink. It drifts across the sea to Byblos on the Phoenician coast, where a young tree, a heath, grows up around it and swallows it whole into the trunk. The local king admires the tree and has it cut down for a pillar to hold up his roof, never knowing what the wood encloses. Isis, following, comes to Byblos and sits down weeping by a well. She is taken in and made nurse to the queen’s infant son, and here the story turns strange and tender.

She suckles the child not at the breast but with her finger in its mouth, and each night she lays it in the fire to burn away its mortality, while she herself becomes a swallow and circles the pillar that holds her husband, singing her grief. When the queen sees her child in the flames and cries out, the burning is broken and the spell undone. Isis reveals herself, asks for the pillar, cuts her husband’s chest out of the heartwood, wraps the fragrant wood in linen, and gives it back to the people of Byblos, who keep it in her temple.

Not a line of this is Egyptian. The Byblos episode, the heath-tree pillar, the royal nursemaid, the swallow at the pillar, appears only in Plutarch. It is a Greco-Roman elaboration grafted onto the older bones, and a beautiful one, but it should be recognised for what it is rather than smuggled in as ancient Egyptian belief.

Torn again, and gathered from the marsh

Isis hides the recovered chest, and here the two stages of Plutarch’s version join: Set, out hunting by moonlight, stumbles on it. He knows the body at once, and this time he does not seal it whole. He tears it into fourteen parts and flings them everywhere. So the search begins a second time, and now it is a search of the marshes.

Isis threads the reed-beds in a barge of papyrus, and Plutarch says that ever after crocodiles would not touch a papyrus boat, out of fear or reverence for the goddess who once rode one. She finds the scattered members one by one, and holds a separate funeral for each where she finds it, which is his explanation for why so many Egyptian towns claimed to hold the tomb of Osiris.

One piece she never recovered. The phallus had been thrown straight into the Nile, and three fish, the lepidotus, the sea-bream and the pike, had eaten it, so that Egyptians afterwards would not touch those three. In its place Isis fashioned a replica, and a festival honoured it. Diodorus tells nearly the same loss, the privates alone unrecovered and a model substituted, though he counts twenty-six pieces and names no fish. The counted dismemberment and the eaten member are the Greek contribution, vivid and memorable, and entirely absent from the Egyptian texts, which speak only of limbs gathered and a body made whole.

One of them on the right, one on the left

Turn back to the oldest material and the picture is quieter and, in its way, more haunting. The two sisters do not chase fourteen pieces across a map. They come to the body together, as birds. Isis comes, Nephthys comes, a Pyramid spell says, one of them on the right, one of them on the left, one of them as a hat-bird, one of them (Nephthys) as a kite. They found Osiris, after his brother Set had felled him to the earth in Nedit. Later Egyptologists hear a fitness in that choice of bird: the kite was a creature of mourning in the Egyptian imagination, its thin cry likened to the keening of a bereaved woman.

Then they set him right. Nephthys has assembled for thee all thy limbs, one spell tells the dead god; she has made them well for thee. Another names the great sister who collected thy flesh, who gathered thy hands, who sought thee, who found thee upon thy side on the shore of Nedit, so that mourning ceased in the two palaces. The gathering is real in the Egyptian texts, but it is a gathering of scattered limbs made whole, not a treasure hunt for a numbered set of parts.

And in the New Kingdom hymn the labour of the search is compressed into a single unwearying line: Beneficent Isis, that protected her brother, that sought for him without wearying, that traversed this land mourning, and took no rest until she found him. In that telling she is essentially alone, one widow crossing a whole country until she finds what she is looking for.

That is the truer shape of the thing. Beneath the Greek machinery of the chest and the coast and the fourteen scattered pieces lies an older and simpler grief: a god struck down by his brother and left by the water, and a sister, or two sisters, who would not rest, would not be turned aside, and did not stop walking until the body was found and the mourning could cease.

Beneficent Isis, that protected her brother, that sought for him without wearying, that traversed this land mourning, and took no rest until she found him. (Great Hymn to Osiris, Louvre C286, tr. Blackman)