The Great Hymn to Osiris is carved on the funerary stela of an official named Amenmose, of the Eighteenth Dynasty around 1500 BCE, and it is the fullest connected account of the Osiris story to survive from Egypt itself. That is a notable fact in its own right: the Egyptians left abundant allusions to the myth but few narratives, and the most complete telling most readers know comes from the Greek of Plutarch, written well over a thousand years later. The hymn praises Osiris as king, as the power in the grain and the flood, and as ruler of the dead, and it celebrates the loyalty of Isis, who searches for her murdered husband, revives him enough to conceive their son Horus, and protects the child until he can claim his father's throne.
What the hymn conspicuously does not narrate is the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Seth. This reticence is characteristic: the violent core of the myth is alluded to but not described, whether from decorum, from a reluctance to give the act the permanence of writing, or simply because the audience knew it. The result is a hymn that praises a god of resurrection while stepping around the death on which his story turns.
Because the stela was carved for private burial rather than public temple use, it also shows how deeply the Osiris cult had penetrated the beliefs and burial customs of Egyptian officials by the New Kingdom, who invoked the god's own resurrection as a model and guarantee for their own passage into the afterlife. The hymn's confidence that Osiris judges and rewards the dead, and that Horus avenges and succeeds his father, made the myth a template for royal succession as well as personal hope, since each new king was identified with Horus claiming the throne of the murdered Osiris.