Osiris
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Osiris. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
o-si'ris, in Egyptian mythology, the Lord of Lords, or King of the Gods. He seems to have represented the sum of all good, as Set represented the sum of all evil. Osiris is said to have been the son of Isis. In other and perhaps more numerous accounts he is represented as the brother and husband of Isis. According to the legend Osiris and Isis assumed human form and descended to earth that they might aid and instruct mankind. After good laws and institutions had been established in Egypt he wandered away to extend the arts of civilization. Set, the Typhon of the Greeks and of Ovid's account, who had striven continually to slay Osiris, laid a plan to entrap him on his return which proved successful. He constructed a beautiful carved box just large enough to hold Osiris. When Osiris returned Set persuaded him by a stratagem to lie down in the box, when he immediately closed it, nailed it up, and threw it away. Isis wandered over the earth seeking for her husband. At last she found the box, but Osiris was dead. Not yet satisfied, Set seized the body and cut it in pieces, scattering the parts in all directions. These Isis gathered and buried. A temple was erected at every place where a part of the body of Osiris had been found. The soul of Osiris passed into the body of the bull Apis. At the death of the bull it was supposed to pass into the body of another bull. Osiris was regarded also as the judge of the dead. He is represented in Egyptian art as of human form, wrapped like a mummy, crowned with a mitre, and holding a flail and a crook. See Mythology ; Egyptian; Set ; Apis
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in Egyptian mythology, one of the chief Egyptian divinities, the brother and husband of Isis, and, together with her, the greatest benefactor of Egypt, into which he introduced a knowledge of religion, laws and the arts and sciences. His principal office, as an Egyptian deity, was to judge the dead, and to rule over that kingdom into which the souls of the good were admitted to eternal felicity. He was that attribute of the deity which signified the divine goodness; ss; and as an avatar, or manifestation of the divinity on earth, he was superior to any even of the Egyptian gods. He was styled Manifester of Good, President of the West, Lord of the East, Lord of Lords, Eternal Ruler, King of the Gods, etc. He was venerated under the form of the sacred bulls Apis and Mnevis; or as a human figure with a bull's head, distinguished by the name Apis-Osiris, and is usually represented as clad in pure white. His general attributes are the high cap of Upper Egypt, a flagellum, and sometimes a spotted skin. Under the form of the sacred bull Apis he was supposed to be always present among men.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A great deity of the Egyptians, husband of Isis . The ancients differ in opinion concerning this celebrated god, but they all agree that as ruler of Egypt he took care to civilize his subjects, to improve their morals, to give them good and salutary laws, and to teach them agriculture.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The story these entries tell — Set trapping Osiris in a carved chest, the scattered limbs, Isis gathering them — comes almost entirely from Plutarch's Greek essay 'On Isis and Osiris', written around 100 CE, more than two thousand years after the god first appears. Egyptology now reads Osiris from Egyptian sources instead: the Pyramid Texts, whose standard edition Kurt Sethe published from 1908, name him in royal tombs of about 2350 BC, and the later Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead show his afterlife opened to ordinary Egyptians rather than kings alone. Aiton's claim that "the soul of Osiris passed into the body of the bull Apis" is now untangled: the living Apis bull belonged to Ptah at Memphis, and only the dead bull was merged with Osiris as Osorapis, the figure from whom the Ptolemaic god Serapis was formed. The wider Victorian frame — Osiris as one of J. G. Frazer's dying-and-rising vegetation gods — has also been heavily criticised, since Egyptian texts present him as a permanently dead king vindicated in the underworld rather than a god returned to life on earth.
Written for this edition, 2026.