Serapis

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A syncretic deity worshipped in Ptolemaic Egypt who combined Egyptian Osiris and Apis traits with Greek features and was honored as a god of healing, fertility and the underworld
2. The Graeco-Egyptian god created under the Ptolemies by merging Osiris and the bull god Apis, venerated across Egypt and the Hellenistic world as a protector of the dead
3. A composite divinity of Hellenistic Egypt, blending Egyptian and Greek religious traditions, whose cult centred on Alexandria and spread widely through the Mediterranean

Etymology: The most striking thing about "Serapis" is that it is a made-up god. Ptolemy I, the Macedonian general who ruled Egypt after Alexander's death, promoted a deity that fused the Egyptian Osiris with the sacred bull Apis, whose Egyptian name is combined with Osiris's in the word's origin. The result, in Egyptian, was a name meaning roughly "Osiris-Apis," and Greek speakers in Egypt turned it into "Sarapis." The Greek form then passed into Latin as "Serapis," and the cult spread across the Mediterranean with Hellenistic and then Roman worshippers. The name reached English by way of Latin, and the word remains a technical term for this Greco-Egyptian deity in historical and religious writing.