The Living King, and the Eye That Was Healed

For three thousand years the reigning pharaoh was Horus. The oldest element of the royal titulary is the Horus name, written in a serekh topped by the falcon: the king on his throne was the living embodiment of the god who inherited Egypt from Osiris. When a king died he became Osiris and his successor became Horus, so that every legitimate succession re-enacted the myth and every pharaoh reigned as a god present on earth. This is one of the most durable ideas in the whole of Egyptian civilisation.

The other thing every Egyptian knew of Horus was his eye. In the fight with Seth, Horus's eye is injured and torn, then healed, by Thoth, or restored whole, and the restored Eye of Horus, the wedjat, became the great symbol of wholeness, healing and protection. It was drawn on coffins and worn as an amulet by the living and the dead alike; its parts were even used as a notation for fractions.

So Horus reaches ordinary Egyptian life from two directions at once: as the divine kingship that ordered the state, and as the healed eye that guarded the individual body against harm.