Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)

ANDREY O. BOLSHAKOV: Osiris in the Forth Dynasty Again? The false door of 'Intj, MFA 31.781

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The most probable date of usage Fig. 4. This is in concordance with the traditional dating of the appearance of Osiris in inscriptions, which means that the false door of Jnti does not make us rewrite the history of one of the most important constituents of Egyptian religion.

90 Recent papers by H. Altenmüller devoted to Osiris are a good illustration of how dangerous a disregard of chronology may be for interpretations of religious phenomena. On the strength of the central position occupied by the scenes related to a bed in mural compositions representing a miraculous birth of the king in the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir elBahari, Altenmüller concludes that they had to guarantee a resurrection of the king in the next world, the world of the gods. Then he turns to representations of a bed in private Old Kingdom tombs and deduces from its designation as s.t his reading of the name of Osiris as jrj-s.t-jr.t - "Der zum bezogenen Bett Gehörende ". This makes him also give up the traditional understanding of the name of Isis in favour of wrsj.t > wisj.t > jsj.t - "Die von der Kopfstütze " (Zu Isis und Osiris, in: Wege öffnen, Festschrift Gundlach, Wiesbaden 1996, pp. 1-17). In the next paper (Zum Ursprung von Isis und Nephthys, SÀK 27 (1999), pp. 1-26.) his conclusions become even more radical. Yet the earliest representation of the bed cited by Altenmüller is placed in the tomb of queen Miij)-s(j)r

nh(.w) III that is hardly later than the reign of Shepseskaf (on the dating see D. Dunham-W. K. Simpson, Giza Mastabas I, The Mastaba of Queen Mersyankh HI., Boston 1974, p. 8.). Altenmüller's reconstructions are also based on the records of the term for a headrest in the early Fourth Dynasty mastaba of Mm and of a bed in the list of offerings of IF(j~)-bl.w-zkr dated back to the late Third early Fourth Dynasty. In this situation, he must either prove that Osiris is an ancient god, at least as old as the Old Kingdom, or give up his theory. However, the time of the first record of Osiris is of no importance for him and he mentions various datings of this moment as equal and foreign to the problems discussed (a.a.O. p. 11, note 42). If accepting Altenmüller's theory, we must admit that the notion of Osiris had been inherent in Egyptian religion since primeval times, which would imply radical reinterprelation of our understanding of the Old Kingdom and which might be verified by the monuments only forcedly; at least I do not know any reliable evidence of the concept of resurrection in private tombs of the third millennium BC (see Bolshakov, op. cit. (note 14), passim). Moreover, it is next to impossible to believe that the figure of the god central in the later Egyptian culture could remain entirely hidden for centuries. However, as soon as we take this moment seriously, as a turning point in the development of religion, Altenmüller's constructions collapse immediately.