What happened in Egypt over 5 thousand years ago? In Abydos in pre-dynastic times, around 3,200 years before the birth of Christ, the cult of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld but also of fertility, was born.

Initially a minor god, Osiris then rose to the role of one of the nine great gods of the Ennead, being considered the first pharaoh of ancient Egypt. But for some, it was much more, perhaps the first ancient alien visitor who came into contact with Egyptian civilization.

Osiris, millennial influence

Certainly, the influence of Osiris was so great that according to the ancient Egyptian religion after death all the pharaohs turned back into Osiris. Officially ceased in 530 AD when the Roman emperor Justinian decreed the closing of the last temple dedicated to Osiris remained in Egypt, the one on the File island, in fact, his cult (and its influence) has persisted more or less secretly in the following centuries.

For example, scholars believe that the Psalm 23 of the Bible is a copy of an earlier Egyptian text where Osiris was defined “the good shepherd”, while the representation of the “divine providence” (an eye enclosed in an equilateral triangle), adopted as much by the Christian church as by masonry, derives from the Eye of Horus (son of Osiris and who was often identified with his father).

The search for the tomb has lasted for centuries

Many think that Osiris really existed and for this, they have been searching for his grave for centuries: initially it was believed to be in Abydos or on File, but it was never found, although at Abydos in the funeral complex of Seti I (nineteenth dynasty) was built an Osireion to resemble a tomb from the seventeenth dynasty.

Then they started talking about the Giza plateau, where it was discovered in 1961 (for some in 1945) from a mysterious Soviet expedition under the “Isis Project” that would have identified her as the tomb of “the first visitor”, rather than in the Valley of the Nobles in Sheikh Abd el-Gourna, near Luxor, where the Italian-Spanish expedition of the “Min Project”, in turn, author of the discovery of another tomb of Osiris, worked.

Scholars on the traces of myth

It could not be missing and in fact, there was no lack among those who sought the tomb of Osiris the famous Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass which identified one in 1999. The site had already been discovered in the 1930s by a famous Hawass predecessor, the Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan, while further references to the plan of the tomb were disclosed in the Fifties among others by Paolo Rumor (which speaks of a find dating back to 1872).

Both the site explored by the Min Project and the one re-discovered by Hawass have in common the presence of one or more wells leading to a series of increasingly ancient burial chambers until you get to a room where it is present a sarcophagus surrounded by water (Osiris was killed by his brother Seth who threw his sarcophagus into the Nile).

In some movies of dubious origin who have long circulated on the web tomb discovered by the Soviets does not present this particular (the water surrounding the sarcophagus), which is typical of Osiris tombs. All, in any case, can not be considered the authentic burial of the “god”, which for some may actually have been an ancient alien visitor deified over the centuries.

The tomb of true Osiris has not been found

Also because the oldest tombs among those found on the sites so far explored would go back to the fifth or sixth dynasty (the most recent ones to the twenty-sixth dynasty), so well after the myth of Osiris was born and after the worship of the god, initially only local, it had spread throughout Egypt. Those found, in short, are only votive tombs but have never hosted the “true” Osiris.

If his tomb has ever existed and if some traces may have been preserved to this day, it is not possible today to say it, as it is not possible to say (or deny) with absolute certainty that Osiris was only the fruit of the imagination of the ancient Egyptians or rather an ancient alien visitor. More and more evidence leads us, however, to believe that the Egyptian subsoil and in particular the Giza plateau still has to reveal many treasures and among these, perhaps, also the tomb of Osiris.