50 Fun Facts About Osiris

In the judgement before Osiris, the heart of a dead person was weighed against what?

A feather. The ostrich plume stood for truth and right order, so a heart heavy with wrongdoing tipped the scales and its owner lost the afterlife.

How was Set, the god who murdered Osiris, related to his victim?

His brother. Set coveted the throne of Egypt and seized it, and the feud passed down a generation when the dead king's son grew up to fight him for it.

Isis, who searched Egypt for the body of Osiris, was his wife and also his what?

His sister. She gathered the scattered pieces of his body, and her magic revived him just long enough to conceive the son who would avenge him.

In the Greek version of the myth, which part of Osiris's body did Isis fail to recover?

His genitalia. Fish in the Nile had eaten them, the Greek telling says, so Isis made a replica; Egyptian accounts have the body recovered whole.

Who was Osiris's posthumously conceived son?

Horus. Isis hid with him in the marshes of the Nile delta until he was grown, and he then fought Set for his father's throne and won it.

Who were the parents of Osiris?

Geb and Nut. Egyptian art shows the sky goddess arched over the earth god lying beneath her, the two held apart by their father Shu, the air.

Which Mozart opera includes the solemn prayer 'O Isis und Osiris'?

The Magic Flute. The high priest Sarastro sings it before Prince Tamino's trials of initiation, part of an allegory built on the Freemasonry that Mozart and his librettist shared.

Which two objects does Osiris hold in his crossed hands?

A crook and a flail. Egypt's kings carried the same pair as emblems of their rule, and Tutankhamun was buried with crooks and flails of his own.

What did the green skin often given to Osiris in Egyptian art signify?

Rebirth. Green was the colour of sprouting crops, and when artists painted him black instead it recalled the fertile mud left behind by the Nile flood.

How is Osiris's body typically shown from the chest down?

Wrapped like a mummy. In the myth his restored body is the first to be embalmed, and pharaohs were later prepared for burial to resemble him.

What does Khenti-Amentiu, a title of Osiris as ruler of the dead, mean?

Foremost of the Westerners. Egyptians tied the west to death, so the 'westerners' were the dead, and the title is usually thought to have belonged first to an older god whose cult Osiris absorbed.

Osiris belonged to the group of nine gods worshipped at Heliopolis, known by what name?

The Ennead. The name is Greek for 'the nine', a divine family tree that starts with the sun god Atum, who brought the first pair of gods into being alone.

Which Old Kingdom writings contain the earliest allusions to the Osiris myth?

The Pyramid Texts. Carved inside royal burial chambers, the spells only ever allude to the murder: Egyptians feared that writing an evil down could make it real.

Which Greek essayist's account has Set conspiring with 72 accomplices?

Plutarch. His On Isis and Osiris is the fullest ancient telling of the story, yet he wrote it in Greek for Greeks, and parts of it match nothing in the Egyptian record.

In the Greek version, where did the chest containing Osiris's body wash up?

Byblos. A tree grew up around the chest and the local king had it cut down for a palace pillar, with the dead god still sealed inside, until Isis came to claim it.

How did Set lure Osiris into the chest, in the Greek telling?

By offering it to whoever it fitted. He had secretly measured Osiris and built the chest to his size, so at the banquet every other guest tried it in vain.

By what Greek name is Set known in the Greek retelling of the myth?

Typhon. Greek writers matched Set, the god of storms and disorder, with the most monstrous enemy of the gods in their own myths.

In the fight to avenge Osiris, which part of his son's body did Set injure?

An eye. Another god healed it, and the restored eye, known as the wedjat, became one of the most common protective amulets in Egypt.

According to Diodorus Siculus, what did Osiris teach the Egyptians to abandon?

Cannibalism. Once Isis had discovered wheat and barley, Diodorus says, people gladly changed their diet, and Osiris set off to teach the rest of the world to farm.

Which city was the traditional burial place of Osiris and centre of his cult?

Abydos. Egyptians longed to be buried near the god's supposed tomb there, and those who could not afford it had a memorial stone set up at the site instead.

What was the 'Osiris bed' found in Tutankhamun's tomb?

A god-shaped tray of soil sown with seed. Sealed in the tomb, the grain sprouted in the outline of the god, a picture of life rising out of death.

Which pillar symbol, seen as the backbone of Osiris, was ritually raised at his festival?

The djed. The pharaoh himself, helped by priests, hauled a wooden pillar upright with ropes, an act that stood for the dead god rising again.

On which Nile island did the temple of Isis, where Osiris was also worshipped, stay open until Justinian ordered it shut?

Philae. Tribes from beyond Egypt's southern frontier had kept coming to worship there, and after the emperor's order the temple of Isis was turned into a church.

Egyptians saw Isis, the wife of Osiris, in which star, whose dawn rising came just before the Nile flood?

Sirius. Egyptians called it Sothis, and a Greek account says they made it the star of Isis because it was 'the bringer of water', returning to the dawn sky as the river rose.

What did the dead recite before Osiris's 42 judges?

Sins they denied. Each denial, such as 'I have not stolen', was addressed to one of the judges by name, so the dead had to arrive knowing all 42.

In the hall of Osiris, which demon devoured the hearts of those judged unworthy?

Ammit. Part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus, she waited by the scales, and a soul she ate simply ceased to exist: Egypt imagined no eternal torment.

Which goddess's principles did the dead need to have lived by to enter Osiris's kingdom?

Maat. Her name was also the Egyptian word for truth and cosmic order, and pharaohs had themselves shown holding her emblems to prove they ruled by it.

At Mendes, Osiris's ba was worshipped in the form of which animal?

A ram. The Egyptian word ba meant both 'soul' and 'ram', so a living ram was kept at Mendes as the god's soul on earth and given a burial of its own when it died.

Osiris was merged with the falcon god Seker and which creator god of Memphis into a single funerary deity?

Ptah. His temple at Memphis was called Hut-ka-Ptah, 'temple of the soul of Ptah', and the name is thought to lie behind the Greek Aigyptos, and so behind the word Egypt.

Which god, promoted by the Ptolemies, is usually said to combine Osiris with the sacred Apis bull?

Serapis. Ptolemy I relaunched the old Memphis underworld god with a Greek face, and he became the patron of Alexandria and, in time, the consort of Isis.

Through syncretism with the god Iah, Osiris was also linked to what?

The Moon. Iah was an old lunar god, and Greek writers pressed the link further, matching the 14 pieces of the god's body to the 14 days in which the full moon wanes away.

Osiris's epithet Wenennefer shares its 'nefer' with the name Nefertiti; what does it mean?

The ever-perfect one. 'Nefer' meant beautiful or perfect, as in Nefertiti, 'a beautiful woman has come'; for Osiris it declared that he went on being so even after death.

What did Egyptians call the underworld over which Osiris ruled?

The Duat. The sun god was thought to sail through it every night before rising again at dawn, and after his own restoration Osiris stayed there for good as its ruler.

Greek writers from Herodotus onward equated Osiris with which of their own gods?

Dionysus. Herodotus says flatly that 'Osiris is, in the Greek language, Dionysus', and Diodorus makes the Egyptian god the one who taught the world to grow the vine.

Which anthropologist's The Golden Bough grouped Osiris with Adonis and Attis as dying and reviving gods?

James Frazer. He gave two volumes to 'Adonis, Attis, Osiris', reading each god as a spirit of vegetation whose death and return mirrored the farming year.

In the Greek telling, the chest holding Osiris was nailed shut and sealed with which molten metal?

Lead. The conspirators nailed the lid down, poured the metal over it and threw the chest into the Nile, which carried the dead king out to sea.

Which sunken city's excavations by Franck Goddio revealed annual Osiris ceremonies?

Thonis-Heracleion. The port sank beneath the Mediterranean and left no trace until divers found it in 2000, with its temples and offerings still on the seabed.

What was the Egyptian paradise ruled by Osiris, where the blessed dead farmed forever, called?

The Field of Reeds. It was imagined as a perfect copy of the Nile delta, so the justified dead found there everything they had lost in life.

Which pharaoh, the father of Ramesses II, built a temple with seven shrines, one of them for Osiris?

Seti I. A carved list in the same temple shows him and his young son making offerings to the names of 76 kings who had ruled before them.

In the Greek telling, which god won five extra days at a board game so that Osiris could be born?

Thoth. A curse had barred the god's mother from giving birth on any day of the 360-day year, so he won enough light at the gaming board to add five more.

Which god leads the newly dead by the hand to the scales in the hall of Osiris?

Anubis. He guided souls from the tomb to the hall of judgement and tended the balance himself, having been lord of the dead before Osiris took the throne.

Which asteroid did OSIRIS-REx sample?

Bennu. The craft touched down just long enough to grab rock and dust in 2020 and sent the sample home in a capsule; the asteroid is named for a sacred bird of Egyptian myth.

Osiris may have begun as the local god of which town in the Nile delta?

Busiris. If so, his worship spread south, where he is thought to have absorbed an older god of the dead and taken that god's name as a title of his own.

Which goddess helped Isis resurrect Osiris?

Nephthys. She was the wife of the murderer Set, yet she took the widow's side, and lamenting Osiris beside Isis is nearly all that Egyptian myth has her do.

The atef crown worn by Osiris was modelled on which piece of royal regalia?

The white crown of Upper Egypt. Kings of the united country wore it combined with the red crown of the north as a double crown, yet no actual example of either has ever been found.

What quality did the pillar-shaped symbol known as the backbone of Osiris stand for?

Stability. The pillar was also a hieroglyph with that meaning, and as an amulet it promised the dead that they would endure as the restored god had.

What did tomb inscriptions show about who could be identified with Osiris at death?

Scholars stress the androgynous nature of the god's fertility, reassembled by Isis to produce the perfect king Horus.

Isis and her sister are often pictured mourning Osiris in the form of which birds?

Kites. Perhaps because the birds' shrill calls sounded like wailing, or because kites range widely for carrion, much as the sisters searched for the body.

Which papyrus collection of tomb spells shows the judgement before Osiris in its Spell 125?

The Book of the Dead. Egyptians knew the spells as Coming Forth by Day; the modern title comes from the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, who published a collection of them in 1842.

In Diodorus's account, which band of Greek goddesses joined the laughter-loving Osiris on his journey around the world?

The Muses. Diodorus says Osiris was fond of music and the dance, so he took along a troupe of musicians that included nine maidens who could sing.