T.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 189 
city was celebrated annually a great festival in honour of Osiris. It 
lasted many days, and the culmination of a long series of ceremonies 
was the raising of the ded-column into an erect position. Osiris is 
intimately connected with this column; the Egyptians called it his back- 
bone. In the myth of Osiris, as recorded by Plutarch, a pillar played 
an important part. Plutarch says that the coffer containing the body 
of Osiris was washed up by the sea at Byblos, the port of the Lebanon, 
and that a tree grew up and concealed the coffin within itself. This 
sacred tree was cut down by Isis and presented to the people of Byblos 
wrapped in a linen cloth, and anointed with myrrh like a corpse. It 
therefore represented the dead god, and this dead god was Osiris. 
Not far from Dedu, the city of Osiris in the Delta, was Hebyt, the 
modern Behbeyt el Hagar. Its sacred name was Neter. The Romans 
ealled it Iseum, or Isidis oppidum. It was the ancient seat of Isis 
worship in Egypt, and the ruins of its temple to that goddess still cover 
several acres of ground in the neighbourhood. On the analogy of other 
sacred names of cities the primitive cult-object here was the nér-pole. 
This was not an axe, as has so often been supposed, but a pole that was 
wrapped around with a band of coloured cloth, tied with cord half-way 
up the stem, with the upper part of the band projecting as a flap at top. 
Dr. Griffith conjectured that it was a fetish, e.g. a bone carefully wound 
round with cloth, but he noted that ‘this idea is not as yet supported 
by any ascertained facts.’ As a hieroglyh this wrapped-up pole 
expresses ntr, ‘ god,’ ‘ divine,’ in which sense it is very common from 
the earliest times; gradually it became determinative of divinity and of 
the divine names and ideographic of divinity. Another common ideo- 
graph of ‘ god’ in the Old Kingdom was the Faleon (Horus) upon a 
perch, and this sign was also employed as a determinative of divinity 
and of the names of individual gods; it even sometimes occurs as a 
determinative sign of the ntr-pole, e.g. Pyr. Texts, 482. This use of 
the Falcon indicates that in the early dynasties the influence of the 
Upper Egyptian Falcon-god (Horus) was paramount. But there is 
reason for believing that the ntr-pole cult had at an earlier period been 
the predominant one among the writing people of the Delta; this, I 
think, is shown by the invariable use of the ntr-pole sign in the words 
for priest (hm-ntr, ‘ god’s servant ’), and temple (ht-ntr, ‘ god’s house ’). 
Now, on a label of King Aha of the First Dynasty there is a representa- 
tion of the temple of Neith of Sais. Here two poles with triangular 
flags at top are shown on either side of the entrance. Later figures of 
the same temple show these poles with the rectangular flags precisely 
as we find in the nétr-sign. A figure of the temple of Hershef on the 
Palermo Stone shows two poles with triangular flags, while a Fourth 
Dynasty drawing of the same temple shows the same poles with 
rectangular flags. We see, therefore, that the triangular-flagged pole 
equals the rectangular-flagged one, and that the nir is really a pole or 
mast with flag. Poles of this kind were probably planted before the 
entrances to most early Egyptian temples, and the great flag-masts set 
up before the pylons of the great temples of the Eighteenth and later 
dynasties are obviously survivals of the earlier poles. The height and 
straightness of these poles prove that they cannot have been produced 
