Osiris and the Gods of the Afterlife
Of all the gods in the Egyptian pantheon, none were more important to ordinary people than the gods of the afterlife. Every Egyptian, from the pharaoh in his golden tomb to the poorest farmer in his reed mat, hoped to survive death and enter the kingdom of Osiris. The Egyptians developed the most elaborate and best-documented ideas about the afterlife of any ancient civilization. To help the dead get there, a small family of gods looked after them: Osiris as judge, Isis and Nephthys as mourners, Anubis as embalmer, and a long list of lesser deities as guardians, gatekeepers, and guides.
For the standard scholarly reconstruction of the afterlife, Erik Hornung’s The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (1999) is the place to start. It is a translation and commentary on the funerary texts themselves, and it is one of those rare scholarly books that a non-specialist can read end to end with profit.
This page introduces that family. It explains who they were, what they did, and how the Egyptians imagined the journey of the dead. For deeper dives, see the long-tail pages on the myth of Osiris, Isis, and Set and on Anubis and the Weighing of the Heart.
Osiris: The First Mummy and Lord of the Underworld
Osiris was once a great king on earth, according to myth, who brought civilization to the Nile. His brother Set killed him, cut his body into fourteen (or, in some versions, sixteen or forty-two) pieces, and scattered them across Egypt. Isis, his wife, gathered the pieces, embalmed them, and reassembled the body, making Osiris the first mummy. From that act of magic, Osiris became the ruler of the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, and the judge of every soul that entered it.
Osiris was almost always shown as a mummified king:
- Green or black skin, the color of fertile silt and of the corpse anointed with rebirth.
- The Atef crown, a tall white cone flanked by ostrich feathers.
- Crook and flail, the symbols of kingship crossed over his chest.
- A long, curled, false beard, the mark of the gods.
His cult was centered at Abydos, where his supposed tomb was a major pilgrimage site. Every year, the Egyptians celebrated the Mysteries of Osiris there, in which the death and resurrection of the god were re-enacted. To read the full story, see the myth of Osiris, Isis, and Set.
Isis: The Mourning Wife and Divine Magician
Isis was the wife of Osiris and the mother of Horus. She was also, in many ways, the most powerful magician in the Egyptian pantheon. It was she who brought Osiris back to life long enough to conceive their son, and it was she who taught the people the arts of civilization, healing, weaving, agriculture, and the proper form of the gods’ names.
In the afterlife, Isis played two roles. She was the mourner who never gave up hope, sitting beside the body of her husband and protecting it. And she was the magical healer who could breathe life into the dead, including, in some traditions, the breath of immortality itself.
Isis was usually shown as a woman wearing a throne-shaped headdress (her name, Aset, means “she of the throne”). In late Egyptian and Greco-Roman times, her cult spread across the entire Mediterranean, and her temples stood in Greece, Italy, and as far as Britain. To learn more about her role as mother and protector, see Isis, Hathor, and the Family and Protector Gods.
Nephthys: The Silent Sister
Nephthys was the sister of Isis and the wife of Set. In the Osiris myth, she plays a small but poignant role: she stands beside Isis as they mourn Osiris, and in some versions of the story she helps Isis find the scattered pieces of his body. She is sometimes called the mother of Anubis, conceived in a brief union with Osiris during the search for his body.
Nephthys was the goddess of the edges, of the night, of death, of the boundary between this world and the next. Her name, Nebet-hut, means “lady of the house” or “lady of the pavilion,” and her symbol was a hieroglyph of a basket on a palace façade. She was often shown in the shape of a hawk, mirroring Isis, or as a woman with the hieroglyph of her name on her head.
Anubis: The Jackal-Headed Embalmer
Anubis was the god of mummification and of the dead. He was almost always shown as a man with the black head of a jackal, black, because the color was associated with rebirth, and a jackal, because jackals were the scavengers that prowled the desert edges of the cemeteries.
Anubis had several jobs in the afterlife:
- He invented embalming when he mummified the body of Osiris for the first time.
- He supervised the embalmers at the mummification workshop, ensuring the body was properly prepared.
- He guided the dead through the underworld to the Hall of Two Truths.
- He weighed the heart of the deceased against the feather of Ma’at to determine whether they were worthy of the afterlife.
The most famous depiction of Anubis at work is the Weighing of the Heart scene from the Book of the Dead. To see it in detail, see Anubis and the Weighing of the Heart.
Other Gods of the Dead
Beyond the Osiris family, a large supporting cast of deities worked in the underworld. They include:
- Thoth, the ibis-headed god who recorded the verdict of the judgement. See Thoth and the Gods of Wisdom and Writing.
- Ma’at, the goddess of truth, whose white ostrich feather was the standard against which the heart was weighed. She appears in our guide to Egyptian mythology.
- Hathor, who welcomed the dead at the gates of the underworld in her terrifying form as the “Lady of the West.” See Hathor, Isis, and the Divine Feminine.
- Ammit, the “Devourer of the Dead,” a monstrous creature with the head of a crocodile, the forequarters of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, who ate the hearts of those who failed the judgement.
- Wepwawet, a jackal god of Upper Egypt, sometimes called “Opener of the Ways,” who led the dead into the underworld.
- Kherty, a ram-headed underworld god who offered the dead a final chance to pass back into the world of the living.
- Sokar, a falcon god of the Memphite necropolis, associated with the underworld and the rising of the sun at night.
The Egyptian Afterlife: A Brief Overview
The Egyptian vision of the afterlife changed dramatically over more than three thousand years. The earliest Egyptians seem to have believed that the dead lived on in or near their tombs, sustained by offerings of food and drink. From the Old Kingdom onward, the goal shifted to becoming an akh, an effective spirit, who could live among the gods.
To become an akh, the dead person had to pass several tests:
- Proper mummification of the body, see our guide to the mummification process.
- Provision of the tomb with canopic jars, grave goods, and offerings.
- Recitation of the right spells from the Coffin Texts or the Book of the Dead, which protected the soul from hostile demons.
- A successful judgement in the Hall of Two Truths, in which the heart was weighed against the feather of Ma’at.
If all these conditions were met, the ba (the soul with personality) and the ka (the life force) would rejoin the body in a transformed, eternal existence in the Field of Reeds, an eternal mirror of Egypt where the crops grew tall and the dead rejoined their families. For the full account, see our guide to the journey of the soul and the parts of the Egyptian soul.
Sacred Animals of the Afterlife
The Egyptians associated several animals with the gods of the dead:
- Jackals for Anubis and Wepwawet
- Crocodiles for Ammit
- Hawks for many underworld gods, including Sokar
- Ibis for Thoth
In the tombs of the nobles at Thebes, vast numbers of mummified animals have been found, including jackals, hawks, and ibises buried as offerings to the gods of the dead. Thebes, in fact, was a major center for the cult of Osiris, and the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile was the burial ground of Egypt’s kings in the New Kingdom.
The Cult of Osiris in Historical Time
The cult of Osiris was already ancient by the time the first Egyptian dynasty arose around 3100 BCE. The Pyramid Texts, carved inside the pyramids of the Old Kingdom, are the oldest religious literature in the world and contain dozens of spells to help the king join Osiris. By the Middle Kingdom, the Coffin Texts, versions of the same spells, were painted on the coffins of officials, and by the New Kingdom, the Book of the Dead was being written on papyrus and placed in tombs across Egypt.
Osiris was so central to Egyptian identity that even the Greeks identified him with their own underworld god, Dionysus. When the Ptolemies later merged Osiris with the Apis bull of Memphis, the new god Serapis became one of the most popular deities of the Greco-Roman world.
The Afterlife Gods and the King
The relationship between the pharaoh and the gods of the afterlife was unique. While ordinary Egyptians hoped to join Osiris after death, the king was already Osiris in his tomb. From the Old Kingdom onward, royal funerary texts identified the dead king with Osiris, and the king’s mother, wife, and daughters played the role of Isis and Nephthys in the funeral rites.
When a king died, his body was mummified in the Per-Nefer (“Beautiful House”) or mummification workshop, and his burial took place on the west bank of the Nile, the land of the dead, in a tomb ideally hidden in a desert valley. The most famous royal burial ground of all is the Valley of the Kings, a single valley containing some 65 known tombs including KV5, the tomb of the sons of Ramesses II, with at least 120 chambers and corridors (Aidan Dodson, Monarchs of the Nile, 1995, pp. 174-198). Tutankhamun, Ramesses II, and many other pharaohs were buried there.