Horus's Contest With Set and Osiris as Judge

Osiris does not return to rule the living; instead he becomes king and judge of the dead in the underworld, the figure before whom the deceased's heart is weighed against the feather of Ma'at in the judgment scene familiar from the Book of the Dead. His son Horus, raised in secret hiding among the marshes of the Nile Delta to protect him from Set, grows to manhood and challenges his uncle for the throne of Egypt in a long contest recorded across several partly differing Egyptian sources, involving trials of strength, legal argument before a tribunal of gods, and a physical struggle in which Horus loses an eye and Set is castrated, before Horus is finally awarded the kingship.

The fullest connected narrative of the whole cycle to survive is not Egyptian but Greek: Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride, written in the late first or early second century CE, many centuries after the myth's origins, for a Greek and Roman readership already fascinated by Egyptian religion under the Roman empire. Egyptian sources themselves preserve the story only in fragments and allusions, chiefly in the much older Pyramid Texts of the third millennium BCE, which assume the story's outline is already familiar rather than narrating it in sequence, so Plutarch's later, outsider synthesis is essential to reconstructing the myth as a connected whole even as scholars weigh how much Hellenistic interpretation he may have folded into it.