The Tomb of Osiris: Perception, Representation and Cultural Construction of a Sacred Space in the Egyptian Tradition

In the Osirian myth, the death of the god at the hands of his brother Seth represents a crucial event for its dramatic character as well as for its ideological implications in qualifying both the divine figure and his role. Although lacking a complete narrative, Egyptian texts allude to the particular circumstances of the incident: according to a longstanding tradition, the murder of Osiris took place on the “bank of Nedyt” and the disiecta membra of the divine body went floating along the Nile before being found, reassembled and buried. While literary sources do not make specific reference to the location and features of the burial, iconographic evidence more effectively illustrate how the Egyptian mind visualised the tomb of the great god of the Underworld. Labelled as “the Mound of Osiris” in the texts, and depicted according to a specific landscape connotation (a hill surmounted by trees and surrounded by waters), such a mythical place also displays an articulated structure, resulting from the combination of three main semantic features (hill; water; trees). Iconic form and symbolic structure will be, therefore, the two foci discussed in the present analysis on the representation tomb of Osiris: on the one hand, the corpus of documents reviewed will enable us to follow its historical evelopment through artistic elaboration; on the other, by breaking the whole icon down into its basic units, it will be possible to disclose the polysemy of each one of them and to highlight the network of mythical and symbolic references underlying the mental epresentation and cultural construction of such a sacred space of the Egyptian religious imaginary.