The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The Nile flows north and the wind blows south. These things will always be.
It is an adage to calm the nerves, and young Senu – the pharaoh’s son – has every reason to be nervous.
He’s arming for battle.
Senu’s uncle has finally shown his true colours; for almost a year, the man has been diverting gold from the Lower Kingdom to pay for mercenaries from beyond Egypt. Now he has turned his army northwards, his eyes set on the throne.
It is not sedition, Senu’s uncle has declared. It is mercy. His acolytes whisper that the pharaoh is too frail, too sickly to rule. They gossip that Senu is too weak, too young to inherit.
‘They’re wrong,’ insists the ibis, the god in bird form perched upon the railings of his chariot.
But young Senu has no stomach for lessons today.
‘You knew, didn’t you,’ he says, fighting back tears. ‘That’s why you kept coming to me: because you knew what my uncle was planning. Well, how are your stupid stories supposed to help me now?’
Senu ends up shouting those last words. They put the bird to flight in a screech, an angry flutter of feathers and a flap that takes it up into the sky, so that high that Senu’s heart twists.
He doesn’t want to be alone. Not here. Not now.
But he’s not driven the ibis away; it drops, stopping itself from crashing with a single beat of its wings and then coming to a perch once again on the chariot railing. And for the first time Senu sees a hint of weakness to his teacher: wings folded, beak bowed. The bird looks exhausted.
‘I didn’t know, boy. No one – neither god nor mortal – can know the future,’ the ibis confesses. ‘But think on what I’ve taught you: this world is built on cycles, and every cycle is at threat. Apep frustrates the daily sequence of the sun; drought upsets the floodings of the Nile. The lineage of the pharaoh – one son to the next – it is a cycle too. Simply another pattern on the loom. Men like your uncle, threats – they are a repeating thread too. I will show you.’
And when the ibis spreads wide its wings, the story of Osiris, of Horus and Set, is writ there upon a white papyrus of feathers.
The first symbol penned upon the ibis’s feathers is a mise en abyme: a bird, a kite soaring between the clouds. It is a goddess, Isis.
She is searching for carrion. She is searching for the remains of her husband, the pharaoh god, Osiris.
You see he has been betrayed. He has been killed. His brother, Set, has mutilated his body, dismembered it, cut it into fourteen pieces and scattered them far and wide across Egypt.
And so, as a kite, Isis plucks limbs off mountain peaks. She unearths organs from the sands with her talons. She fishes for flesh in the Nile depths with her beak. Over the course of decades, Isis stitches each part and binds together each new piece. And finally, with Osiris’s body wrapped in linens – these last rites of a pharaoh – only one thing is missing: his phallus has been eaten whole by a Nile perch.
Desire is the key to resurrection. It is vigour, virulence, vitality. And so Isis crafts her husband a new phallus before taking him into her loving embrace.
But it is a shadow life she speaks into his body. Osiris is a thing of death now. A reflection. An echo. He can rule only the underworld, the Duat.
Osiris’s throne in the living world – that must fall to his child now, a son conceived during his resurrection: young Horus, the falcon-headed.
Horus life begins in constant peril. After all, he is little more than a fledgling: sickly and blind, his falcon head covered in down not feathers.
The traitor, Set, has declared himself the new god pharaoh, and he sends all manner of creatures to kill Osiris’s child: serpents and scorpions, lions and leopards. Isis is young Horus’s only protection. No one could deny her devotion, but she is no fighter, so she must rely on her cunning. On her craft.
She takes Horus down into the Nile delta, and there among the papyrus marshes, she stitches reeds and binds together stems. She builds a nest. A haven. A place where Horus can grow into his prime.
The god Set is as tough as a lion, hardy as a hippo, and cunning as a desert fox. So under Isis’s tutelage, Horus sharpens not only beak, but mind. He flexes not only feather but thought.
He becomes a son worthy of his father. A son worthy of the pharaoh’s crown.
That is when he issues his challenge to Set.
Horus and Set meet before a tribunal of the other gods on the banks of the Nile.
Young Horus contends that he is the pharaoh’s true born son. He insists that the lineage of Ra to Shu to Geb to Osiris must be respected.
Set simply contends that Horus is too weak, too young to rule.
Their divine clash is as much a duel as a debate. You see, the true power of gods is not their strength. It is their speech. It is their ability to speak thoughts into existence.
And so the argument causes their bodies to warp, to bend and twist. They sprout great manes, great fangs. They skulk and stalk the Nile marshes as lions, each trying to pounce upon the other with some rhetorical flourish, some cutting remark. And though at first, it seems Set is the tougher, Horus holds his own until the Ennead judge them equal.
Next their bodies bloat, their skin turns grey – the argument transforms them both into hippos. They sink their great gaping maws below the water and compete to see who can hold his breath, who can filibuster longest. And though at first it seems Set is the hardier, they both bubble away on the Nile bed for years until, again, the Ennead judge them equal.
Finally, the argument becomes a matter of skill. Horus and Set shift into men. They will compete as mariners, sailing barges laden with great stone blocks. But here is where Horus turns to his mother’s tutelage. Her craft. Her cunning. While he chops trees to build his barge, he also constructs great wooden frames, painting them to appear as stone.
As soon as the race gets under way, Set begins to struggle. He is a master sailor, but the stone blocks are simply too heavy; his barge sinks. He can only thrash in the Nile current and watch as Horus’s barge floats serenely by, sailing all the way to the river’s mouth.
Set knows it must be some trick, but what can he say. What argument can he make: he claimed his cunning was what marked him as a good pharaoh, and here, he’s been outfoxed.
There can be no judging them as equal now.
Horus has won his crown.
Though the ibis has finished its story, a last image remains inked upon the white papyrus of feathers: a crown.
‘Yes, your uncle is tough as a crocodile, hardy as a hippo and cunning as a desert fox,’ the ibis says, ‘But you can be too. You are the pharaoh’s true born son.’
Senu nods. He climbs into his chariot, takes his spear in hand and then turns to the bird one last time, feigning a smile, a false air of confidence.
‘If this world is built on cycles, does that mean, like Horus, I defeat my uncle too? Does that mean I win?
‘It means you have to win.’
Commissioned by HistoryHit for The Ancients podcast
Written by Andrew Hulse