Abydos

The goddess Neith was one of Egypt’s oldest deities, very well documented from the Early Dynastic period, when Egypt was first brought together as a unified country. She is very familiar from later periods, particularly in the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate periods (figure 1). Over the millennia she was endowed with numerous attributes: a creation goddess, a sky goddess, a protector of the king (with Isis, Nephthy and Serket), protector of one of the Four Sons of Horus, the mother of Sobek, and the consort of Seth, occasionally associated with snake, cow and pig. So where did this great deity come from? The earliest evidence to allow the formation of a coherent picture is Early Dynastic. [more…]

The Osireion was first excavated by Sir William Flinders Petrie, Margaret Murray and Petrie’s wife in the early 1900s. They found the tunnel and excavated towards what they called the “hypogeum.” It was full of sand and Roman filling when they began to clear it. Even before the full excavation of the site Murray speculated, convincingly, that “this was the building for the special worship of Osiris and the celebration of the Mysteries” [more…]