Tmai el-Amdid, in the ruins of Thmuis, and some
of their sarcophagi are now in the Gizeh Museum.

** The Bonu, the chief among these birds, is not the
phoenix, as has so often been asserted. It is a kind of
heron, either the _Ardea cinerea_, which is common in Egypt,
or else some similar species.

The goddess whom we are accustomed to regard as inseparable from him,
Isis the cow, or woman with cow's horns, had not always belonged to him.
Originally she was an independent deity, dwelling at Buto in the
midst of the ponds of Adhu. She had neither husband nor lover, but had
spontaneously conceived and given birth to a son, whom she suckled among
the reeds--a lesser Horus who was called Harsiisit, Horus the son of
Isis, to distinguish him from Haroeris. At an early period she was
married to her neighbour Osiris, and no marriage could have been better
suited to her nature. For she personified the earth--not the earth in
general, like Sibu, with its unequal distribution of seas and mountains,
deserts and cultivated land; but the black and luxuriant plain of the
Delta, where races of men, plants, and animals increase and multiply
in ever-succeeding generations. To whom did she owe this inexhaustible
productive energy if not to her neighbour Osiris, to the Nile? The Nile
rises, overflows, lingers upon the soil; every year it is wedded to the
earth, and the earth comes forth green and fruitful from its embraces.

[Illustration: 187.jpg ISIS, WEARING THE COW-HORN HEAD-DRESS. 1]

1 Drawn by Boudier from a green basalt statue in the Gizeh
Museum. Prom a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

The marriage of the two elements suggested that of the two divinities;
Osiris wedded Isis and adopted the young Horus. But this prolific and
gentle pair were not representative of all the phenomena of nature.
The eastern part of the Delta borders upon the solitudes of Arabia, and
although it contains several rich and fertile provinces, yet most of
these owe their existence to the arduous labour of the inhabitants,
their fertility being dependent on the daily care of man, and on his
regular distribution of the water. The moment he suspends the straggle
or relaxes his watchfulness, the desert reclaims them and overwhelms
them with sterility. Sit was the spirit of the mountain, stone and sand,
the red and arid ground as distinguished from the moist black soil of
the valley. On the body of a lion or of a dog he bor