Isis was a major goddess of ancient Egyptian religion whose cult spread widely through the Greco-Roman world. In the Osiris myth she resurrects her slain husband Osiris and protects their son Horus; Greeks and Romans identified her with Demeter, Aphrodite, and other goddesses of maternity and magic. Ovid's Metamorphoses places her temple in Crete as the deity who transforms Iphis.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Isis" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Egyptian goddess
Isis appears already in Old Kingdom sources as a principal figure of the Osiris myth: she gathers and revives the murdered Osiris, conceives Horus, and later aids the dead as she aided the god-king. She was invoked as divine mother of the pharaoh (likened to Horus) and in healing and protective magic for ordinary people. Early cult prominence was strongest in funerary and magical texts; later temples gave her a larger public role.
In art she is usually a woman wearing a throne-shaped hieroglyph on her head. During the New Kingdom she absorbed traits of Hathor and is often shown with cow horns and a sun disk.
II.Greco-Roman reception
From the Hellenistic period Isis was worshipped across the Mediterranean as a universal savior goddess of fertility, navigation, and initiation. Interpretatio graeca linked her to Demeter, Aphrodite, and other maternal or mystery deities; her temples and processions became familiar in Greek cities and in Rome.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses she appears in Crete: she forbids Telethusa to expose the infant Iphis and, on the eve of Iphis's wedding to Ianthe, transforms the girl into a man. That literary episode is the atlas's narrative hook for the node, not a claim that Isis originated as a Cretan nymph.