Papyrus Salt

This hieratic papyrus preserves an annual ritual to protect the “House of Life,” sacred space in Osiris’s temple at Abydos. Although the text dates to the Persian or perhaps even Hellenistic period, scholars are fairly certain that it reflects much earlier Egyptian practices. The ritual describes an ideal House of Life, within which the god Osiris—here assimilated with the sun god Re—is protected by its four walls, representing the gods Isis, Nephthys, Horus, and Thoth, respectively. The ceiling of the structure was Nut (“heaven”) and the floor was Geb (“earth”), thus forming a kind of microcosm. Vignettes drawn on the papyrus depict a schematic of this structure as well as drawings that picture Osiris’s chief threat, Seth, bound back-to-back with an Asiatic (for this reason, Asiatics were not permitted to enter the sacred precinct; compare Deuteronomy 23:1—7). The papyrus refers to sixteen books that were consulted during the rite and prescribes the fabrication of statues of both Osiris and his enemies.