I do not deny that in later ages Osiris became much more than this. Nor do I deny that his name was accepted as a symbol for all the happy and pious dead. Furthermore, we shall find at a later stage that he was identified in the end with an annual slain Corn-God. I will even allow that there may have been more than one original Osiris--that the word may even at first have been generic, not specific. But I still maintain that the evidence shows us the great and principal Osiris of all as a Dead Chief of Abydos.
We must remember that in Egypt alone history goes back to an immense antiquity and yet shows us already at its very beginning an advanced civilisation and a developed picture-writing. Therefore the very oldest known state of Egypt { 165}necessarily presupposes a vast anterior era of slow growth in concentration and culture. Before ever Upper or Lower Egypt became united under a single crown, there must have been endless mud-built villages and petty palm-shadowed principalities along the bank of the Nile, each possessing its own local chief or king, and each worshipping its own local deceased potentates. The sheikh of the village, as we should call him nowadays, was then their nameless Pharaoh, and the mummies of his ancestors were their gods and goddesses. Each tribe had also its special totem, about which I shall have a little more to say hereafter; and these totems were locally worshipped almost as gods, and gave rise in all probability to the later Egyptian Zoolatry and the animal-headed deities. To the very last, Egyptian religion bore marked traces of this original tribal form; the great multiplicity of Egyptian gods seems to be due to the adoption of so many of them, after the unification of the country, into the national pantheon. The local gods and local totems, however, continued to be specially worshipped in their original sites. Thus the ithyphallic Amen-Khem was specially worshipped at Thebes, where his figure occurs with unpleasant frequency upon every temple; Apis was peculiarly sacred at Memphis; Pasht at Bubastis; Anubis at Sekhem; Neith at Sais; Ra at Heliopolis; and Osiris himself at Abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.
Even Egyptian tradition seems to preserve some dim memory of such a state of things, for it asserts that before the time of Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty, reputed the earliest monarch of a united Egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the country. In other words, it was recognised that the gods were originally kings of local lines which reigned in the various provinces of the Nile valley before the unification.