Great Hymn to Osiris — Stela of Amenmose

notes

The Great Hymn to Osiris is inscribed on the funerary stela of Amenmose, a New Kingdom official, now in the Louvre (C286). Amenmose himself is a comparatively obscure figure; the value of his monument lies entirely in the hymn it preserves — one of the most complete and rhetorically ambitious accounts of Osiris myth from ancient Egyptian sources. The hymn presents the essential Osiris narrative in condensed form: Osiris's kingship over the two lands; his murder (implied but not described in this text — the Egyptian propriety before speaking of divine death); Isis's tireless search for her murdered brother-husband; her miraculous conception of Horus after his death; the rise of Horus to reclaim his father's throne; and the establishment of cosmic and agricultural order that results. This is the most detailed pre-Ptolemaic Egyptian text of the Osiris cycle; Plutarch's much later On Isis and Osiris (2nd century CE Greek) provides the fullest narrative account, but the Great Hymn to Osiris shows what the myth looked like when the New Kingdom Egyptians told it themselves. The parallels of Osiris to later dying-and-rising god traditions — Adonis, Tammuz, Attis, Dionysus, and (in the view of many comparative religionists) the Christ narrative — have made this myth central to the study of resurrection mythology worldwide. Translation: Adolf Erman, "The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians," translated into English by A.M. Blackman, London: Methuen, 1927. Public domain.

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