Horus

It has been proposed, from the days of the earliest chroniclers of Egypt, that Horus, the young falcon god, was in fact an alien and that he originated in Arabia. This alien nature of the falcon is suggested in the Edfu inscriptions which are thought to descend from very ancient originals. It has also been suggested that his name means ‘the distant one’, recalling perhaps his origins far away from the Valley, though equally it could evoke the figure of the falcon flying high above the desert seeking its prey.

An anomaly of the cult of Horus is that the Egyptians do not seem to have employed the hawk as a hunting bird. This is its role par excellence in Arabia and it is surprising that neither Horus nor any of the other hawk and falcon gods of Egypt is ever represented as a hunter. It seems unlikely that they had any particular reservation about so representing him: after all, the hound, which is particularly identified with the god Set, is often shown as the companion of man at the chase.

The ‘Hunters’ Palette’, a predynastic artefact of great celebrity and significance, has been recognized as containing many elements which may identify the hunters depicted as west Arabians. Clothing, hairstyles, and weapons are virtually identical with those shown on rock carvings in western Arabia.27 It is not impossible that Horus was a divinity of these people; this palette will be considered further for the information which it provides on the customs and symbolism employed in the period around the emergence of the kingship.

Horus was Osiris’ son, incarnate eternally in the living king just as the dead king was identified with Osiris; one of the oldest and certainly the most august of the royal titles of the king proclaims him as the living Horus. Horus fought with Set to avenge his father’s death, to rule over Egypt in his place, and to carry on his work of bringing the benefits of civilization to the people. A late myth survives which purports to descend from remote times; it relates how Horus drove back foreign invaders whence they came, beyond the Red Sea into Asia.

Other of the great gods were sometimes thought of by the Egyptians themselves as originating outside Egypt. Some were Libyan; several came from Syria and the north, particularly in the later periods. Diodorus reports a tradition, admittedly a very late one, that Osiris and Isis, the immortal brother and sister of later Egyptian myth, were Arabian in origin.