The falcon-god Horus (Egyptian Heru) is really several gods that Egyptian theology allowed to overlap. The older figure is Horus the Elder, a sky-god whose two eyes are the sun and the moon and whose name may mean the distant one or the one on high, a cosmic falcon spread across the heavens, worshipped from the earliest periods. The younger figure is Horus son of Isis and Osiris (Harsiese, or as a child Harpocrates), the avenger of his murdered father. Egyptians did not always keep the two separate, and a given text may mean either.
It is the younger Horus who carries the central myth. Conceived by Isis after she revives Osiris, hidden and raised in the Delta marshes, he grows up to contend with his uncle Seth for the throne of Egypt. Their struggle, told at length in the New Kingdom Contendings of Horus and Seth, runs through violent episodes and a long divine tribunal before Horus is awarded the kingship.
That contest is not only a story about gods. It is the mythic charter of the Egyptian throne itself, which is the point that gives Horus his enduring political weight.