Two Gods Named Horus: The Elder, the Child and a Greek Mistranslation

The existing description already tells the story most readers know as Horus, the falcon headed son of Isis and Osiris who contends with Set for the throne of Egypt and whose wounded left eye becomes a symbol of healing. Egyptian religion actually recognized two originally separate gods under the name Horus, and the familiar throne contender is only the younger of them. Horus the Elder, called Haroeris in Greek transliteration, appears in the earliest Egyptian religious texts as one of the first generation of gods, a sky deity and brother to Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys rather than their child, already fully formed as a falcon god of kingship long before the Osiris myth cycle gave Egypt its younger, avenging Horus the Child. Over centuries of Egyptian religious development the two figures blurred into one another in cult and iconography until most surviving temple material addresses a single composite Horus rather than distinguishing the two. The Child's own later history took an unexpected turn under Greek rule. Greek visitors to Egypt after Alexander's conquest saw the standard Egyptian iconography of Horus the Child as an infant with a finger raised to his lips, an Egyptian hieroglyphic convention for depicting a child, and misread the gesture as an adult sign for silence, giving rise to Harpocrates, a wholly Greco Roman god of secrecy and confidentiality built from a mistranslated image of an Egyptian baby.