that these views about Osiris are assumed to be known to the reader of
religious texts and accepted by him, and in the earliest funeral book
the position of Osiris in respect of the other gods is identical with
that which he is made to hold in the latest copies of the Book of the
Dead. The first writers of the ancient hieroglyphic funeral texts and
their later editors have assumed so completely that the history of
Osiris was known unto all men, that none of them, as far as we know,
thought it necessary to write down a connected narrative of the life and
sufferings upon earth of this god, or if they did, it has not come down
to us. Even in the Vth dynasty we find Osiris and the gods of his cycle,
or company, occupying a peculiar and special place in the compositions
written for the benefit of the dead, and the stone and other monuments
which belong to still earlier periods mention ceremonies the performance
of which assumed the substantial accuracy of the history of Osiris as
made known to us by later writers. But we have a connected history of
Osiris which, though not written in Egyptian, contains so much that is
of Egyptian origin that we may be sure that its author drew his
information from Egyptian sources: I refer to the work, _De Iside et
Osìride_, of the Greek writer, Plutarch, who flourished about the middle
of the first century of our era. In it, unfortunately, Plutarch
identifies certain of the Egyptian gods with the gods of the Greeks, and
he adds a number of statements which rest either upon his own
imagination, or are the results of misinformation. The translation
[Footnote: _Plutarchi de Iside et Osirids liber: Graece et Anglice_. By
S. Squire, Cambridge, 1744.] by Squire runs as follows:--

"Rhea, [Footnote: _i.e._, Nut.] say they, having accompanied Saturn
[Footnote: _i.e._, Seb.] by stealth, was discovered by the Sun,
[Footnote: _i.e._, R[=a].] who hereupon denounced a curse upon her,
'that she should not he delivered in any month or year'--Mercury,