Osiris Myth

Indirect evidence for Osiris
The main basis for an early Osiris is the so called "Myth of Osiris". This describes the birth of the main gods of Egypt and their not very peaceful coexistence. The god Horus plays an important role in our understanding of the early Egyptian pantheon, and the many symbolisms in this myth, like the Djed pillar and Osiris tombs, are important for dating the possible age of the cult. But let's start from the beginning.

The Myth of Osiris
The surviving legend of Osiris tells us about the life of Osiris as king of Egypt, and how he brought prosperity and happiness to the country. We are told that he brought the knowledge of agriculture and livestock farming to the Egyptians, and how he loved his sister Isis. They even had a child, Horus, together.
Seth, the brother of Osiris, was jealous about the success of his brother as he longed to be king himself and planned to overthrow him. He made a chest covered with gold and gemstones and during a celebration promised to give it to the person it fitted exactly. Nobody knew that Seth had constructed the chest using Osiris' measurements, and when it was Osiris' turn to try the chest it fitted perfectly. At that moment Seth and 72 conspirators jumped out, nailed the chest shut, and threw it into the Nile where it sank to the bottom.
When Isis heard about this she started a long search for the body of her beloved husband and after many years she found the chest inside a large tree at Byblos (which is probably not the city in Lebanon, but another name for a city in the Nile delta [1]).
The king of this country felled the tree and used it to make the first Djed pillar which he used to support the roof of his palace. The chest containing the body of Osiris was given to Isis who returned with it to the court of Horus.
Seth discovered it there and became furious. He tore the body of Osiris into 14 pieces and scattered them around the country. Isis again embarked on a quest to find these pieces, and built a special tomb for every piece found. After all the pieces were buried Osiris returned from the dead to teach Horus how to fight and so revenge him...
These are the basic concepts of the Osiris myth. But the full story is a mess. We learn, for example, that Osiris had an affair with Seth's wife Nephtys, and that they even had a son, Anubis, together - and that Seth knew about it. Well could THIS, for example, be the source of Seth's anger?
The number of Greek gods in the Osiris myth is also disturbing. Strange.
But it's not so strange when we learn the context of the myth: The only complete version comes from a Greek. It was written by the well known philosopher Plutarch, who lived between 46 and 125 AD![2]. Of course this doesn't mean that the Osiris myth didn't exist much earlier as even the oldest religious texts, the Pyramid Texts, refer to parts of it. But the details are frequently very different from Plutarch's version as he collected the surviving portions after 3000 years of changes. But which parts of the myth have an early origin, and which parts were added later? This is of great importance for the Orion theory.

We know for example that the part of the story about tearing Osiris' body into 14 pieces is most probably an addition from the Late Period, some 2000 years after the pyramid era when the myth originated[3] - and that is the quick and unspectacular end of Bauval's "nice to have" number of pyramids = number of bodyparts.
The story of the procreation of Horus also shows influence from different periods as there are several collected in the myth. Plutarch wrote that Horus was the product of an affair that Isis and Osiris had inside the womb of their mother, Nut. Other versions of the story move this to the time of the resurrection of Osiris by Isis and Nephytis, some even to the time of the reassembly of Osiris' body (although some parts of the myth do not even have the tearing-apart-part but have the individual Osiris tombs instead).
These few examples show that there is no "Osiris myth", only a collection of totally different parts from different periods and different regions that don't fit together. It is not a nice, simple, straightforward piece of literature - and that goes for most parts of Egyptian religion!