BUSIRIS, the name of a mythical king of Egypt not found either on the monuments or in the chronological lists, but mentioned by the later Greek writers and mythologists. By Apollodorus he was made the son of Aegyptus, and an Egyptian king, or else the son of Poseidon and Lyssianassa. After Egypt had been afflicted for nine years with famine Phrasius, a seer of Cyprus, arrived in Egypt and announced that the cessation of the famine would not take place until a foreigner was yearly sacrificed to Zeus or Jupiter. Busiris commenced by sacrificing the prophet, and continued the custom by offering a foreigner on the altar of the god. It is here that Busiris enters into the circle of the myths and parerga of Heracles, who had arrived in Egypt from Libya, and was seized and bound ready to be killed and offered at the altar of Zeus. Heracles burst the bonds which bound him, and, seizing his club, slew Busiris with his son Amphidamas, and his herald Chalbes. This exploit is often represented on vase paintings, the Egyptian monarch and his companions being represented as negroes. Although some of the Greek writers made Busiris an Egyptian king and a successor of Menes, about the sixtieth of the series, and the builder of Thebes, those better informed by the Egyptians rejected him altogether; they do not even admit that lie was the lieutenant of Osiris set over the lands opposite Phoenicia and the Mediterranean, nor do they recognize him as living two centuries after Perseus and later than Heracles. Various esoterical explanations were given of the myth, and the name not found as a king is recognized in that of one or more cities of the same name in Northern Egypt. The legend was unknown both to Homer and to Hesiod, and appears after the Greeks were more intimately acquainted with ...Egypt, and had seen the wall-paintings, or imperfectly understood the popular tales and traditions of the people, for there is no solid reason to believe that human sacrifices were ever offered in the country.
BUSIRIS, the name of an Egyptian town, the capital of the Busirites nomos, or Busirite nome, called in the hieroglyphs Pa-osiri, or Place of Osiris, the eponymous deity of the place. It is the modern Abusir, and lay, according to Herodotus, in the middle of the Delta. It was supposed to be close to the entrance of the gates of the Aahlu, or Elysium, and the nome to be that called in the hieroglyphs Kahebs; and Busiris itself may have been the Egyptian Tattu. Close to the town, which lay on the Phatnitishor Pathmitish arm of the Nile, was the pyramid of the king Sahura, the successor of Uskafan, a king of the 4th dynasty; this was called the Sa-ba, or pyramid of the “Rising Soul,” and some supposed that the name Pa-sahura, or “city of Sahura,” may have been the origin of the name Busiris instead of Pa-osiri. The later Greek authors gave many different versions of the name mixed up with their own mythology, such as that Isis had there interred Busiris in the wooden figure of a cow, and that the place was hence called Bousosiris, or that the goddess had there buried Osiris, when killed by Typhon, in the body of the same animal enveloped in bandages—legends evidently confused with the burial of the Apis in the Serapeum which lay in the vicinity. The shrine of the goddess Isis was situated in it, and a great annual festival and lamentation of Osiris held there, which appears from an inscription of the temple of Denderah to have taken place on the 14th day of the month Choiak. At the time of the privilege, conferred on the nomes of Egypt by the Emperor Hadrian, of coining the money struck at the time of his visit to that country, and dated in the 11th year of his reign 117 a.d., the Busirite nome issued small bronze pieces on which is the goddess Isis standing holding a cow or goat in one hand and a serpent in the other. Demetrius of Phalerum, the philosopher, exiled by Ptolemy Philadelphus, is said to have died at Busiris 284 b.c., having put an end to his life by the bite of an asp. The city was destroyed by the Emperor Diocletian in the 3d century a.d., but the Copts and Arabs have preserved its name in Bousiri and Abusir. Another village of the same name is supposed to have existed in the Letopolite nome.
Herodotus, ii. 59, 61,165; Apollodorus, ii. 1, 5; Diodorus, i. 17; Isocrates, Orat., ii.; Hyginus, Fab., ii. 45; Sclιol. Apollon. Rhod., iv. 13, 96; Gerhard, Trinkschalen, 8 s 9, Toelion D’Annecy, Recherches sur les Mcdaιlιes aes nomcs, p. 190.
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