Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [23]
WARS OF RELIGION?
Contrary to the general rule—that our knowledge increases as we move forward in time—we know less about the Second Dynasty than we do about the First. We lack a basic source, the tombs of the kings. There are only two Second Dynasty tombs at Abydos, and they date from the very end of the period. Excavations at Sakkara have produced two large underground galleries that may belong to the Second Dynasty—but not to the two kings who have tombs at Abydos. If these Sakkara tombs had superstructures, they have vanished, but in the galleries were found seals bearing the names of the first three kings of the Second Dynasty—Hetepsekhemwi, Raneb, and Nynetjer. It’s not necessary to remember these names; they will not turn up again in these pages. I just put them in to show how thorough I am.
We don’t know why Manetho started a new dynasty with the Second. There are definite signs of dissension, and they take an unexpected form. The country had only been unified for a few generations, and we might expect that the conquered had not completely given up their dreams of independent power. But the rebellion against the central authority was not solely a matter of political conflict. It was tied in with religion.
Of all the gods and goddesses of Egypt, the best known are probably Isis and Osiris. Osiris was regarded as the earliest king of Egypt, who brought the Egyptians out of savagery, giving them laws and teaching them how to cultivate the land. He married his sister Isis, and their wise and benevolent rule was praised by gods and men alike. But Osiris’s jealous brother Set murdered the king and usurped his throne. The body of Osiris was recovered by his devoted wife, whose laments so moved the gods that they restored Osiris and gave him kingship over the land of the dead. The posthumous son of the royal pair, Horus, finally defeated his wicked uncle Set in a bloody hand-to-hand combat and regained the throne. Hence the king of Egypt was called “the Horus.” When he died he became Osiris and was buried by his son, the new Horus, with the same pious devotion that the god Horus had shown his father.
This myth has been interpreted in a number of ways. The followers of the “Dynastic Race” idea regard Horus as the patron deity of the conquerors and Set as the god of the indigenous population. The events were narrated by the winners, so their god became the avenging son and Set became the manifestation of evil; as someone has pointed out, the devil has never had the story told from his point of view either.
Another theory views Set as the god of the south (he was originally the local god of a town called Ombos in Upper Egypt) and Horus (Set’s opposite number) as the god of the north. If we are determined to make political hay out of the story, this identification leaves us stuck with an unrecorded conquest of the south by the north, the exact opposite of Menes’s conquest. This overly simplistic notion disregards the fact that Egyptian gods cannot be tidily restricted to a single place. Horus was also top god at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt. To confuse the picture still further, he was a sun god as well as the son of Osiris.
There is a third interpretation, which is that the story is theological in import, representing a rather naive version of the conflict between good and evil, light and darkness. The protagonists in the battle are not Osiris and his brother, but Horus and Set. The “Contendings” of this belligerent pair were a favorite motif in folklore and literature. Horus’s symbol is the hawk; the little picture of the bird is the hieroglyph used to write the god’s name. The symbolic animal of the Antagonist, Set, is a more mysterious beast. The squatting or standing quadruped with the long, drooping snout and upstanding ears has to be a composite or a complete fiction, so we just call it the “Set-animal.”
The Egyptian duality of good