The War of Horus and Set Page 8
An example of the fine portraiture on a Roman-era Coptic mummy. (The Print Collector / Alamy)
Between these problems, and the fact that more and more of the mummies were of people from different cultures and religions than the Ancient Egyptian one, the exterior decoration of the mummies became more important than spells and amulets and the like. Death masks and decoration that showed off the status of the deceased became more prevalent. In the region around Faiyum, which was on the site of the oldest settlement in Egypt, a form of pigmented wax painting was used to paint portraits on boards tied to the heads of mummies. This practice continued throughout the Roman occupation and all the way into the Christian era.
Of course, Christians had no interest in having portraits of ancient pagan gods painted on their bodies, and so their portraits were almost photo-realistic images of the deceased as they had been in life. The Coptic Christians believed in mummification because they thought that angels would ensure that the body of the dead would be raised incorruptible, as that of Jesus had been. Mummification gave them a head start in this, and so it remained a part of Coptic Christianity until well into the 8th century AD. By this point, little of the actual process of mummification was retained. In the 7th and 8th centuries AD, bodies no longer had their organs removed for drying, but were simply wrapped in salt and linen with generally unsuccessful results.
The Eyes of Horus look down over the Eyptians at work in this bas-relief sculpture. (Library of Congress)
It will never end. It cannot, as long as people still tell stories, because this is one of the oldest stories there is, except that it never gets old. The names may change, and the attributes of the characters may vary, but the story will never truly be forgotten, because not only is it a universal story that has gone far beyond its original cultural context, but because the people who told it and wrote it down did that so well.
Plutarch might have given us a version with a very different Set from the character that the ancients probably intended, but in the end he probably did Set a favour, because he is the character who is most memorable. Osiris’s role in the story was to be the archetypal mummy, but mummification is not a going concern today. Horus showed the Egyptians that the son of the pharaoh should inherit the throne, but there are no more pharaohs. Set was never intended to be the embodiment of all evil, but audiences love to have a villain to boo, and, in becoming that villain, Set became the most remembered of them all. Maybe Horus did not really win after all.
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Partridge, Robert P., Fighting Pharaohs: Weapons And Warfare In Ancient Egypt, Peartree Publishing (2002)
Plutarch, Essays, trans. Robin Waterfield, Penguin Classics (1992)
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