Please read THIS and comment.
I am not sure where this topic belongs so please forward it to wherever.
HUGS!
Sqrl
Okay, I’ll bite. Read what?
Crap, I messed up on the coding. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000217/od/osiris_1.html is what I wanted read.
HUGS!
Sqrl
I don’t get it - this is the ancient god Osiris, yet the tomb was dated to 500 BC? Shouldn’t it be about 4000 years older than that?
SqrlCub,
Are you asking if the body in the tomb is really Osiris? If it is Osiris, it can help provide an insight to how and when Egyptian mythology was created. There is a equally good chance that it was somebody who wanted to associate themself with the god of the underworld.
That article doesn’t provide enough information about the validity of the find, or or its true archaeological context.
Try our fried pies.
On the noon news they didn’t mention the age of the sarcophagus. They DID mention the 3000 year old bones. I wonder if that 500 B.C. is a typo? I can’t wait to see the PBS and Discovery specials on this one!
How come their always sending little boys down into tunnels in Egypt anyway? You never hear, “Well, we found this mine over here in Nevada and their was tunnel we couldn’t get to so we went and got Bubba’s nephew and sent him in there…” Just an observation.
Well, my Egyptian mythology is very rusty. But is there some significance when the article said, “…500 BC in the New Kingdom?” I assumed that the New Kingdom was older than the 3000 years that the article claims the bones to be. If I remember correctly, Osiris actually took Ra’s spot as ruler of the gods since the Pantheon was in existence for so long Ra actually died. I would assume that this person took on Osiris’s name but am not certain as to how to read the article since it is unclear as to what it is saying. Granted 3000 years is a long time but the pyramids and the mythology surrounding them are significantly older than that.
Is there a pinpointed spot where Osiris actually enters the Egyptian pantheon? I believe that this article is incorrect in stating that Osiris took over the underworld (I am no longer sure about that) becuase I believe that Annubis actually was the ruler and I don’t remember ever hearing his position ever being taken over. I am 99% sure Osiris took over as a Sun god whose original scheme in life was equated to some type of ressurection. Part of the Osiris myth, had him dismembered but since he was a god he didn’t die. His wife put him back together but left off his genitals. To reitterate my point, he originally represented sometype of rebirth as I mentioned earlier, but I thought somewhere in there he took over as the Sungod. Could someone out there give a timeline of when Osiris supposedly did all these things.
HUGS!
Sqrl
PS. It was common practice for a son to take on the name of a famous ancestor or god. Could this have been the case? I really thought The Osiris myth dated far earlier than a paltry 3000 years ago.
Well, by the Middle Kingdom the Egyptians had already decided that Osiris’ tomb, mythologically speaking, was in Abydos, not Giza (there was an object there that they interpreted as the reliquary for his dismembered head). That’s in upper Egypt (south, that is). So are they disagreeing with the contemporay account of where his tomb was?
Osiris was originally an upper Egyptian king in the prehistoric era, but was conflated with a local death god by the 11th C. BC-- r.e. the historicity of it all. So the early Egyptian knew that he had been in the southern part-- nowhere near Giza, so I guess they win out over current work (I suspect that this “find” has been announced by some hacks).
Oh, ps:
He stayed very popular, and if you really wanted to make sure you were resurrected well you would appropriate all sort of kingly perogatives into your burial-- sort of becoming king Osiris to the point of appointing yourself “The Osiris, Squirrelcub”. Pharohs, upon dying, were sort of assimilated “into” Osiris. So perhaps out hacks are not reading carefully-- yes, it was common to be buried “as” a god.
Osiris, after he was appropriated by the heliopolan religion (middle kingdom, I think) did take over some powers which had earlier been given to Ra, but he was never technically a sun-god
Blah blah blah…
Ancient Egyptian tourist attraction. <BLINK>“Come and see the tomb of the Great God Osiris!</BLINK> Only three sheckels a head; two for students , senior citizens or the Royal Embalmers & Mummifiers Union members! Come one! Come All! <font size=1>Don’t push, son; don’t crowd!</font>Plenty of room for all!!”
There’s a (fill in the blank here) born every minute. 
With magic, you can turn a frog into a prince. With science, you can turn a frog into a Ph.D, and you still have the frog you started with.
Osiris was the god of agriculture, and of the afterlife. His son was anubis, who was the god of embalmers (though, actually, Osiris usurped anubis as a god of the afterlife). Anyway, you can refresh your knowledge of Egyptian myhology at: www.EgyptianMyths.com
This page has some official information from Dr. Zahi Hawass, Director of the Giza Pyramids and Saqqara:
http://guardians.net/hawass/osiris1.htm
“The final chamber we found was most likely a symbolic tomb for the god Osiris; he was believed to control the underground tunnels and tombs of the kings.”
But where were the Spiders?
I remember watching a TV show a year ago or so where Zahi Hawass was digging under the pyramids on prime time. I remember that they found a tomb under one of the pyramids that matches the description in the article of the Tomb of Osiris. In the TV show, they never mentioned anything about the tomb, which pissed me off because the thing was very cool looking. They found it than smiled than walked away.
If the two are one and the same, I wonder what took them so long to announce it. Decyphering heiroglyphics?
And is it possible that the tomb isn’t the resting place of Osiris, but is just called “The tomb of Osiris” anyways? It could just be a name. Or it could be both.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
-H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
I remember that show! Geraldo Rivera was the host. They spent about 99% of the show discussing the “Curse of King Tut,” sort of hinting that if the viewers would stay tuned, they might get to watch Geraldo and the archaeologist being struck down by the Wrath Of The Mummies. I remember the tomb being a bit of a bust, having been flooded and looted (not necessarily in that order) in antiquity.
This has little to do with this, but I was in the Louvre a couple of weeks ago, and I was appalled at what I saw. In one of the Egyptian rooms, a shrivled, backened corpse lay naked in a case with a cloth draped across his hips, presumably to give the poor man a bit of dignity. He looked so pitiful and exposed, and it struck me that this was the body of * a human being * and that in a thousand years from now it could be my body laying in that coldly lighted, humidity-controlled case, photographed by tourists, and far from my native soil.
Large slabs of beautifully decorated granite hung on the walls, with a small sign indicating that it had come from this tomb or that. Hacked from the tomb wall, I imagine.
As I looked at that long-dead man who lay on the table, I felt almost guilty. We took away his tomb, any trinkets that we found, the inscriptions, and even his wrappings. It struck me as very sad.
Actually, Lissa, the show I was talking about was different. It had nothing to do with King Tut. It was all brand new excavations. I just looked it up and came up with the following:
Broadcast journalist, Maury Povich, will host “Opening the Lost Tombs: Live from Egypt” on Tuesday, March 2, 1999 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. In alliance with the Government of Egypt, FOX will present the first live broadcast of an archeological excavation on the Giza Plateau during this two-hour special event.
I’m sorry, but real archaeology is not a spectator event. In fact it is quite menial, trivial and boring if you are not involved in a hands on manner. Even then it can be rather tedious. If context and site mapping of artifacts found in-situ are not important than what you have is grave robbing and not archaeology.
I was going to pass on this thread, but I have to take exception to adam’s comment, as an archaeologist, I do not find my vocation either menial or trivial. I grant you, it can be tedious sometimes (if you’re doing it right) but it’s the details that count.
A site can be anything from a low key historic site, an ancient fire pit, a cenote, or an amazing tomb. As a teacher of historical archaeology, I find that the public who come to learn the craft are filled with misconceptions about it. Don’t get your ideas about it from the movies or guys like Hawass who are looking for press. People like him find the tombs of gods and kings every third Tuesday.
All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people.
generally they find it every other day, in between the cans of peaches and the pile of their underwear, or lacking the underwear, in the cavern of their left nostril. 
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
—The dragon observes
I am also an archaeologist. I think that either you misunderstood my comments or I didn’t make myself clear. The work is not trivial or menial when the cause is advancing knowledge. I, however, would not want to spend time watching people map an excavation, that is not a TV friendly activity. And if you saw that I said not mapping the artifacts in-situ is pretty much equal to grave robbing. In the past, yes, that is how archaeology was done. That doesn’t work today when the act centres on learning about a site, as opposed to collecting trinkets.