Beyond his cosmic role as the earth itself, Geb appears in Egyptian myth in an active, judicial capacity: as the father of the contending claimants, he presides as arbiter in the long dispute between Horus and Set over the rightful kingship of Egypt, a conflict narrated at length in sources such as the New Kingdom text known as the Contendings of Horus and Set. In one stage of the story, Geb initially proposes to divide the land between the two rivals, awarding Set the desert regions associated with the god's own fierce, arid character and giving Horus the fertile Delta, a compromise meant to satisfy both claims without declaring an outright winner.
Later in the tradition, and reflected in the standard royal ideology of later periods, Geb's judgment moves further and he awards the whole of the unified Two Lands to Horus as the legitimate heir, confirming him as king and Set as excluded, a resolution that matches the historical ideology of pharaonic kingship in which the reigning king is Horus and the throne itself is called the throne of Geb. This judicial role fits naturally with his broader character: as the ground on which the two kingdoms literally rest, the earth-god is the fitting authority to decide how the earth should be divided, and the mythic image of Geb apportioning Egypt between rival heirs echoes, in miniature, the same conflict over inheritance and succession that runs through the rest of his own family's mythology from Osiris and Set onward.