DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.11225#0420
398
EGYPTIAN SOULS AND THEIR WORLDS
divinities who had been intrusted by the living with tbe
transmission, kept part for their own use, as a percentage
for tbe office they had been asked to perforai ; the rest was
handed over to the person or persons designated by name in
the dedicatory formula of the sacrifice. The realm of Osiris
was at its best but a counterfeit of the realm of Pharaoh, and
that will seem to many, who know what Egypt was, a poor
idéal of a paradise; such as it was, it must have looked the
perfection of happiness, to people whose notions of future
life had been previously confined to the Land of Sokaris.
Whatever themerits of this conception, it had at least one
fault : the site allotted to it was not secludecl enough to pre-
vent intrusion. When the islands in the marshes became
accessible to living men, the Field of Ialou departed from
them, leaving behind its name, which stnck to one of the
small districts of the northern Delta till the time of the Ptole-
mies, and a few legencls, some of which were collected by
Greek dragomans thousands of years afterwards, and supplied
Herodotus, among others, with the story of the blind king
Anysis. There is some reason to suppose that it landed first
upon the coast of Phœnicia, in a place which we know to
have been very closely connected with Egyptian myths. It
was said that the chest containing the corpse of Osiris had
been carried away to Byblos by the waves of the sea, and
« there gently lodged in the branches of a tamarisk bush,
which in a short time shot up into a large tree, growing
round the chest, and enclosing it on every side, so that it
could not be seen; and the king of the country, having eut
down the tree, had made the part of the trunk wherein the
chest was concealed, a pillar to support the roof of bis house ».
I do not know whether Osiris and bis kingclom passed from
Phœnicia to the more remote coast of Cilicia, and thence to
heaven. It is enough to say that, even in the inscriptions of
the fifth dynasty, we fincl them out of our world, settled,
islands and ail, in the neighbourhood of the Great Bear, in the
EGYPTIAN SOULS AND THEIR WORLDS
divinities who had been intrusted by the living with tbe
transmission, kept part for their own use, as a percentage
for tbe office they had been asked to perforai ; the rest was
handed over to the person or persons designated by name in
the dedicatory formula of the sacrifice. The realm of Osiris
was at its best but a counterfeit of the realm of Pharaoh, and
that will seem to many, who know what Egypt was, a poor
idéal of a paradise; such as it was, it must have looked the
perfection of happiness, to people whose notions of future
life had been previously confined to the Land of Sokaris.
Whatever themerits of this conception, it had at least one
fault : the site allotted to it was not secludecl enough to pre-
vent intrusion. When the islands in the marshes became
accessible to living men, the Field of Ialou departed from
them, leaving behind its name, which stnck to one of the
small districts of the northern Delta till the time of the Ptole-
mies, and a few legencls, some of which were collected by
Greek dragomans thousands of years afterwards, and supplied
Herodotus, among others, with the story of the blind king
Anysis. There is some reason to suppose that it landed first
upon the coast of Phœnicia, in a place which we know to
have been very closely connected with Egyptian myths. It
was said that the chest containing the corpse of Osiris had
been carried away to Byblos by the waves of the sea, and
« there gently lodged in the branches of a tamarisk bush,
which in a short time shot up into a large tree, growing
round the chest, and enclosing it on every side, so that it
could not be seen; and the king of the country, having eut
down the tree, had made the part of the trunk wherein the
chest was concealed, a pillar to support the roof of bis house ».
I do not know whether Osiris and bis kingclom passed from
Phœnicia to the more remote coast of Cilicia, and thence to
heaven. It is enough to say that, even in the inscriptions of
the fifth dynasty, we fincl them out of our world, settled,
islands and ail, in the neighbourhood of the Great Bear, in the