CHAPTER CXXVIII.
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Renouf, P. Le Page (Peter Le Page) and Naville, Edouard
Invocation of Osiris.
Hail to thee, Osiris Unneferu, son of Nut and eldest son of Seb: the Great One who proceedeth from Nut; the king in Taa-urit;(1) the Prince in Amenta; the Lord of Abydos; the Lord of Forces; the most Mighty; the Lord of the Atef crown in Suten-hunen, the Lord of Power in Taa-urit,(2) the Lord of the Mansion: most Powerful in Tattu: Lord of Administration,(3) and of many festivals in Tattu.
Horus exalteth his father Osiris in every place; associating Isis the Great with her sister Nephthys.
Thoth speaketh to [Horus] with the potent utterances(4) which have in himself their origin and proceed from his mouth, and which strengthen the heart of Horus beyond all gods.
Rise up Horus, son of Isis, and restore thy father Osiris!
Ha, Osiris! I am come to thee; I am Horus and I restore thee unto life upon this day, with the funereal offerings and all good things for Osiris.
Rise up, then, Osiris: I have stricken down for thee thine enemies, I have delivered thee from them.
I am Horus on this fair day, at the beautiful coming forth(5) of thy Powers: who lifteth thee up with himself on this fair day as thine associate god.(6)
Ha, Osiris! thou hast come and with thee thy Ka, which uniteth with thee in thy name of Ka-hotep.(7)
He glorifieth thee in thy name of the Glorified: he invoketh thee in thy name of Hekau: he openeth for thee the paths in thy name of Ap-uat.(8)
Ha, Osiris! I am come to thee that I may set thine adversaries beneath thee in every place, and that thou mayest be triumphant in presence of all the gods who are around thee.
Ha, Osiris! thou hast received thy sceptre, thy pedestal and the flight of stairs beneath thee.(9)
Regulate thou the festivals of the gods, and do thou regulate the oblations to those who reside in their mansions.
Grant thou thy greatness to the gods whom thou hast made, great god, and make thine appearance with them as their Ensign.(10)
Take thou precedence(11) over all the gods and listen to the Voice of Maāt on this day.
Said over the oblations made to the Strong One on the Festival of Uaka.(12)
Notes.
The ancient papyri do not contain this chapter. The translation follows the text of the Turin Todtenbuch, occasionally corrected by other papyri of the later period. There is nothing specially interesting in the chapter: the first portion of it is an invocation to Osiris under certain names, as in many other hymns[140] to the god from the time of the XIIth dynasty down to the latest times: the latter portion consists of evocations addressed by Horus to his father. Their prototype is to be found in formulas frequent in the Pyramid Texts. These were much admired and imitated in the Saïtic and the later periods.
1.King in Tau-urit. Osiris is also called at Philæ. And in the second line of this chapter he is called in Tau-urit which, if not identical with Abydos, must have been a part of that town or in its immediate neighbourhood.
2. is equivalent to , the title of Osiris in Pepi I, line 8. And the Power is defined as “thy Power which is upon the Glorified.”
3.Administration; literally things. See note 3 on Chapter 18.
4.Utterances. See note 2 on Chapter 1, and compare Merenrā, 103, and Pepi II, 13.
5.Coming forth. Cf. ϣⲁⲓ, ἀνατέλλειν, ἀνατολὴ, and the meanings ἐξοδεία and ἑορτή, which, on the tablet of Canopus, correspond to the Egyptian . The first hour after sunrise was called ; so that “the beautiful Coming forth of thy Powers” may be a mere technical periphrasis for daybreak.
Besides the of Rā in Chapter 17, it is well to remember such proper names as , , , , , and , with several others.
6.Thine associate god, or one of those about thee, .
See Note 2 on Chapter 18. M. Chabas in his commentary upon the fine hymn translated by him in the Rev. Arch., 1857, considers it “une circonstance bizarre” that Osiris is several times included among his ‘Djadjou.’ The bizarrerie is easily explained by parallel expressions known to every Greek scholar, οἱ ἀμφὶ Πεισίστρατον in Herodotus means Pisistratus with his troops, and in Thucydides, οἱ περι Θρασυβουλον means Thrasybulus with his soldiers. In the Iliad (3, 146) οἱ ἀμφὶ Πρίαμον is explained by the Scholiast as meaning Priam himself: τοῦτ ἐστιν, ὁ Πρίαμος.
7. This passage as it stands is the alteration of one of the Pyramid Texts (Teta, 284; Pepi I, 54): “Horus hath brought to pass that his Ka [? image] which is in thee should unite with thee in thy name of Ka-hotep.”
8. This whole passage is also taken from the Pyramid Texts. Its chief value in this place is in evidence of a truth not yet generally acknowledged by Egyptologists, that Ap-uat (or as written in the Pyramid Texts, Up-uat) is really Osiris. The proofs are numerous and overwhelming.
I produced evidence of this identity in the P.S.B.A. of June 1, 1886, from an obelisk of the XIIth dynasty now at Alnwick Castle, and in 1891 Brugsch published in his Thesaurus (p. 1420) a tablet, now in the Louvre, of the same period as the obelisk, which also treats Ap-uat as one of the names of Osiris. But the earliest as well as the most instructive evidence is that of the Pyramid Texts. The later form of it is thus given on the coffin of Nes-Shu-Tefnut at Vienna (see Bergman, Recueil, VI, p. 165): “Horus openeth for thee thy Two Eyes that thou mayest see with them in thy name of Ap-uat.”
But the Pyramids of Teta (l. 281) and Pepi (l. 131) say, “Horus openeth for thee thine Eye that thou mayest see with it in its name Ap-uat.” Each of the Eyes of Osiris is Ap-uat, one of them is the Southern and the other is the Northern Jackal. These two facing each other form part of the symbolism explained in Note 2 upon Chapter 125.
The figure of the Jackal is wholly insufficient as an argument that Ap-uat is identical with Anubis. Much better evidence is found in the fact that the name of Anubis is sometimes written over the figure.[141] But the true explanation of this is, what might have seemed incredible to some of our older scholars, that Anubis is itself only one of the names of Osiris.
The Pyramids of Pepi I (line 474 and following) and Pepi II (l. 1262 and following) give imaginary etymologies of certain names of Osiris which are repeated in the inscriptions of the tomb of Horhotep, published by M. Maspero (Miss. Arch., I, 260). One of these names is , which is said to be derived from , “pass thou over to me.” The next is Anpu, which is derived from ! The true meaning of is not jackal, but whelp; the fierce young of an animal; not only of jackals or lions but of men, kings or gods, . Thus Orestes speaks (Eur., Orest., 1) of σκύμνον ἀνοσίου πατρός, and the Chorus of another play talks of the reception of τὸν Ἀχίλλειον σκύμνον (Andr., 1170). And Shakespeare speaks of “the young whelp of Talbot’s raging brood.”
9.Pedestal, ; the stand upon which the images or emblems of the god were carried in procession. The is very frequently supported by it; .
Flight of stairs, . See Note 2 on Chapter 22.
10.Ensign, i.e., insignis, one who bears the distinguishing mark or sign of investiture .[142] See Note 4 on Chapter 78.
Osiris is here presented as the Sāhu of the gods whom he has called into existence. The Hymn of the Bibliothèque Nationale (line 7) calls him .
Chnumhotep at Benihassan says of the king, , “he distinguished me above all his nobles,” that is the order of men bearing the sign of investiture.
11.Take precedence, . I take the word in the same sense as where it occurs (without the determinative of sound) in Denkm., III, 29a; in parallelism with .
12.Uaḳa, ; in the older texts (as in Pepi I, 98); one of the oldest festivals of the Egyptian calendar, kept on the 17th and 18th of the month Thoth.
The Pyramid Text says “Behold, he cometh to thee as Orion ([143]); behold Osiris cometh as Orion the Lord of Wine (, vinosus, full of wine), who cometh on the fair festival of Uaḳa.”