Chapter 5 (part 2)

In course of time he became king of Egypt, and devoted himself to civilizing his subjects and to teaching them the craft of the husbandman; he established a code of laws and bade men worship the gods. Having made Egypt peaceful and flourishing, he set out to instruct the other nations of the world. During his absence his wife Isis so well ruled the state that Typhon [Set], the evil one, could do no harm to the realm of Osiris. When Osiris came again, Typhon plotted with seventy-two comrades, and with Aso, the queen of Ethiopia, to slay him; and secretly got the measure of the body of Osiris, and made ready a fair chest, which was brought into his banqueting hall when Osiris was present together with other guests. By a ruse Osiris was induced to lie down in the chest, which was immediately closed by Typhon and his fellow conspirators, who conveyed it to the Tanaitic mouth of the Nile. These things happened on the seventeenth day of [1. For the text see De Iside et Osiride , ed. Didot (Scripta Moralia, t. iii., pp. 429-69), § xii. ff. 2. The days are called in hieroglyphics ###, "the five additional days of the year," e?pago'menai!hme'rai pe'nte ; see Brugsch, Thesaurus Inscriptionum Aegytiacarum , Abt. ii. ( Kalendarische Inschriften ), Leipzig, 1883, pp. 479, 480; Brugsch, Aegyptologie , p. 361 Chabas, Le Cálendrier , Paris (no date), p. 99 ff. 3. Osiris was born on the first day, Horus on the second, Set on the third, Isis on the fourth, and Nephthys on the fifth; the first, third, and fifth of these days were considered unlucky by the Egyptians. 4. The mouths of the Nile are discussed and described by Strabo, XVII., i., 18 (ed. Didot, p. 681) and by Diodorus, I., 33, 7 (ed. Didot, p. 26).] Plutarch's version. the month Hathor, when Osiris was in the twenty-eighth year either of his reign or of his age. The first to know of what had happened were the Pans and Satyrs, who dwelt hard by Panopolis; and finally the news was brought to Isis at Coptos, whereupon she cut off a lock of hair and put on mourning apparel. She then set out in deep grief to find her husband's body, and in the course of her wanderings she discovered that Osiris had been united with her sister Nephthys, and that Anubis, the offspring of the union, had been exposed by his mother as soon as born. Isis tracked him by the help of dogs, and bred him up to be her guard and attendant. Soon after she learned that the chest had been carried by the sea to Byblos, where it had been gently laid by the waves among the branches of a tamarisk tree ({Greek e?pei'khj tini` }), which in a very short time had grown to a magnificent size and had enclosed the chest within its trunk. The king of the country, admiring the tree, cut it down and made a pillar for the roof of his house of that part which contained the body of Osiris.