bringing forth and rearing her child in the papyrus swamps of the
Delta, and the persecution which she suffered at the hands of her
husband's enemies, form the subject of many allusions in texts of all
periods. She has various aspects, but the one which appealed most to
the imagination of the Egyptians, was that of "divine mother"; in this
character thousands of statues represent her seated and suckling her
child Horus whom she holds upon her knees.

8. Set was the son of Seb and Nut, and the husband of Nephthys. At a
very early period he was regarded as the brother and friend of "Horus
the Elder," the Aroueris of the Greeks, and Set represented the night
whilst Horus represented the day. Each of these gods performed many
offices of a friendly nature for the dead, and among others they set
up and held the ladder by which the deceased made his way from this
earth to heaven, and helped him to ascend it. But, at a later period,
the views of the Egyptians concerning Set changed, and soon after the
reign of the kings called "Seti," _i.e._, those whose names were based
upon that of the god, he became the personification of all evil, and
of all that is horrible and terrible in nature, such as the desert in
its most desolate form, the storm and the tempest, etc. Set, as a
power of nature, was always waging war with Horus the Elder, _i.e._,
the night did battle with the day for supremacy; both gods, however,
sprang from the same source, for the heads of both are, in one scene,
made to belong to one body. When Horus, the son of Isis, had grown up,
he did battle with Set, who had murdered Horus's father Osiris, and
vanquished him; in many texts these two originally distinct fights are
confused, and the two Horus gods also. The conquest of Set by Horus in
the first conflict typified only the defeat of the night by the day,
but the defeat of Set in the second seems to have been understood as
the victory of life over death, and of good over evil. The symbol of