n the first of the month Thoth of the calendar.
However, if we accept with them the date 3300 B.C. as the date of
the First dynasty, then in 4200 B.C. the Egyptians were just
emerging from a neolithic state. They were culturally incapable
of making a formal calendar and could have no possible use for
one. Either the calendar did not originate in Egypt, or it was
introduced in 2780 B.C., when again the heliacal rising Sothis
fell on the first of Thoth. At this time the Osiris story was
dominant, in the religion. We have a race almost certainly
Semitic, fusing the primitive race during the period 3500-3000,
and a few centuries later we have a new religious idea dominating
the fused race. When we examine this new idea, the Osiris belief,
we find its earliest form nothing more nor less than the common
tammuz or Adonis story of the Semites. The conclusion lies very
near at hand, that the Osiris story is in fact the Tammuz story,
brought into Egypt by the earliest Semitic tribes. In any case it
was a race with a large Semitic mixture which utilized this story
in working out a theory of immortality; and in all probability we
have in the Osiris-Isis religion a third great religion due to
the Semitic race.

However this may be, it is clear that the craving of the king for
a special immortality, for an exalted future life, found its
justification through the Osiris-Isis myth. Horus was the
successor of Osiris as lord of the earth and the living. The
kings of Egypt were the successors of Horus. The chief name of
the king was his Horus name; Menes was the Horus Aha, Cheops the
Horus Mejeru. When the king died, he became Osiris, and passed to
the kingdom of Osiris. He passed through the underworld with the
sun-god, abode there as Osiris, the god-king, or sped to the
heavens to the celestial gods. Thus comes the entering wedge
of a great change in the conception of immortality--an ordinary
immortality for the common man, a special divine immortality
for the divine man, the king. [It appears probable that the
deification of the king and the assumption of a divine immortality
for him was prior in time to the statement of these beliefs in
the terms of the Osiris story.] Even at this early age, it
was, of course, clearly stated that the king must be righteous,
morally satisfactory in the eyes of the world and of the gods.
The gods, as always, were on the side of the moral code, and
especially on the side of the organize