The Pyramid Texts tell us that Osiris, son of Nut, the Sky, and Geb, the Earth, inherited his father's throne, but was overthrown by his brother Seth, principle of discord. Plutarch transmits the whole legend as follows:
In the very distant past, after having completely organized and civilized the land of Egypt, Osiris confided the care and governing of the country to Isis, his sister, and left for the south in order to teach agriculture, the laws of harmony, and the ways of worshipping the divine powers, to the still savage peoples of those regions.
[The first dynasty was c. 3200 BC- His trip must have been before then]
When, after a long absence, Osiris returned to Egypt, Seth and his seventy-two accomplices trapped him in an ambush. They enclosed him in a coffin made to fit his dimensions and they threw it into one of the arms of the Nile. It was carried out to sea and floated northward until the waves washed it ashore at Byblos in Lebanon. A magnificent tree grew up around the coffin, and the king of that country, when he heard of this marvel, had the tree cut down to make a column in his palace.
Isis, meanwhile, having heard from the whispers of the winds what had become of Osiris, set out in search for him. Arriving one day at Byblos, and transformed into a swallow, she flew around and around the column. Finally she succeeded in bringing the sarcophagus back to Egypt, where she hid it in a remote part of the Delta. But one night when Seth was hunting by the full moon he discovered it, seized the body of Osiris, cut it into fourteen pieces and scattered them all over the country.
So Isis, aided by her sister Nepthys, set out in quest of the parts of Osiris' body. As she found each part, she buried it in the place where it had come to rest, as a sacred relic. Thus, the head was preserved in a reliquary at Abydos, an ear was to be found at Sais in the Delta, and the left lower leg, the Calf of Osiris, on the isle of Bigah where, as the legend say, the sources of the Nile spring forth.
On the last day of the month of Khoiak the burial of the seed-bed and the statutes of the year takes place. They are interred in a mound of earth shaded with persea trees.
This same day, the resurrection of Osiris is publicly celebrated by the erection of the Djed pillar or Osirian column-a beautiful representation of which can be seen in the Templet of Abydos. This ceremony was public and according to all the known calendars took place on the 30th of Khoiak (mid-November, if we follow the 'vague year' or 25 December in the Alexandrian calendar).
The Yakuts say that the future shaman 'dies and lies in the yurt [tent] for three days without eating or drinking', writes Meircea Eliade in Shamanism. It is said that 'formerly the candidate went through the ceremony three times, during which he was cut to pieces. The candidate's members are removed and disjointed with an iron hook, the bones are cleaned, the flesh scraped, the body liquids thrown away and the eyes torn out from their sockets.'
...
We find in the Pyramid Texts: . . . And the King is given back the use of his eyes and mouth with a hook of meteroic iron. (Pyramid Texts, 13-14)
'O Isir! Thy mouth is opened for thee with the thigh of the Eye of Hor. . .with the hook of Upual. . .with this metal born of Seth, the adze of iron with which is opened the mouth of the divine entities,' say the Pyramid Texts (13-14). 'My mouth is opened by Ptah with celestial [meteoric] iron scissors', proclaims the deceased in the Book of the Coming Forth into Day (Chapter 23).
Neolithic sites at the southern apex of the Nile Delta reveal the existence of a population of agriculturalists whose grain crops were carefully stored in silos. The grains of barley from these sites submitted to radiocarbon examination have been shown to date from at least 4600 BC. Long centuries of cultivation must have been necessary to develop this crop from the wild barley; it follows that the origin of agriculture, attributed to Isis and Osiris, was well before the fifth millennium BC.