Pyramid Texts (Osiris's death and revivification, earliest attestations)
The oldest large religious text corpus in the world: ritual utterances carved inside the pyramid of Unas and his 6th-Dynasty successors. They are the earliest attestation of the Osiris mythos — but allusively: the texts presuppose that Osiris was slain by Seth, found and reassembled by Isis and Nephthys, vindicated, and installed as ruler of the dead, and they ritually identify the dead king with Osiris so that he shares this fate. No connected narrative of the myth exists in Egyptian until much later; the first full story is Plutarch's Greek account, ~2,500 years after Unas.
The dead king is addressed as Osiris and promised the same restoration: rising, being gathered together, living — e.g. utterances where Isis and Nephthys seek and reassemble the god (Allen 2005, Unas and Teti corpora).
Critical structural fact for the "dying-rising" category: Osiris is revived into the netherworld, as its king. He does not return to the land of the living; his vindication is succession (Horus) plus underworld kingship. "Resurrection" in the Frazerian sense overstates the Egyptian material.
Attestation gap: presupposed myth c. 2350 BCE (class 2, allusive) vs. first connected narrative 2nd c. CE (Plutarch, in Greek, with interpretatio graeca distortions). Both dates recorded per vault rule.
Allen's translation is current standard. The allusive character means reconstructions of "the" Osiris myth from the Pyramid Texts are scholarly composites; Plutarch's late narrative (dismemberment into 14 parts, the chest/coffin episode) cannot be projected back to the Old Kingdom without flagging. Egyptologists (e.g., Griffiths; J. F. Borghouts) caution against reading seasonal-vegetation symbolism as the myth's origin rather than one of its layers.
dying-rising-god