Eighty Years Before the Tribunal

One New Kingdom papyrus tells the succession dispute as a court case, and it is the longest surviving telling of it. Horus and Set argue their claim before the assembled gods for eighty years. The tribunal wavers, Ra hesitates, Isis tricks a judgment out of Set by disguising herself, and the two contestants fight as hippopotami, race boats said to be of stone, and try to humiliate one another in ways the papyrus records without embarrassment. Its tone is closer to farce than to scripture, and the same dispute is treated with complete gravity in temple inscriptions. Egypt kept both registers.