Skip to content
Egyptian Mythology
← All sources

Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris

When

c. 100 CE

Where it survives

Written in Greek, by a Greek priest of Apollo

What it is

The only connected, complete telling of the Osiris myth that survives, and the source of almost every modern retelling: the dismemberment into fourteen pieces, the search, the missing phallus.

Read it with this in mind

The most used and least reliable source on this list. Plutarch wrote three thousand years after the Pyramid Texts, in another language, for a Greek philosophical audience, and interpreted throughout. Details found only in Plutarch should be attributed to Plutarch.

Myths attested here

Other sources