Osiris

Osiris was the god who made death survivable. Murdered by his brother Set, dismembered, and reassembled and revived by his wife Isis, he became lord of the underworld and judge of the dead — and, crucially, the promise that every Egyptian could follow. To die “an Osiris” was to be reborn as he had been; the elaborate machinery of Egyptian funerary religion, from the weighing of the heart to the spells of the Book of the Dead, existed to win each person that resurrection. For three thousand years his cult city of Abydos was the most coveted burial ground in Egypt, drawing pilgrims and the dead who wanted to lie near the god who had beaten death.

The god of resurrection could not, in the end, resurrect his own worship. As Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, the temples that sustained Osiris emptied; the last datable hieroglyphic inscription was cut at Philae in 394 CE, and around 537 the emperor Justinian had Philae itself — the final working temple of the old gods — shut down. The faith that had spent three millennia rehearsing the defeat of death simply stopped being practised. It is a fitting grave for this museum: a deity whose entire promise was that nothing truly ends, ended — his temples closed, his mysteries unperformed, his name no longer the password to eternity but a line in a mythology.