Eye of Horus

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection, royal power and good health, has its own place in the Unicode computing standard, at code point U+13080. Seven more code points, U+13081 through U+13087, hold the separate pieces of the eye. A drawing of one eye still has a slot in modern software, and that says something about how long it mattered. Egyptians painted it on coffins and on the bows of boats. They wore it as jewelry and invoked it in medical spells. It began in a myth about a violent rivalry between two gods. How does a torn-out eye become a shield against evil? Why did a pair of eyes get tied to the moon, to temple offerings and to the dead? And did the eye also work as a system for writing fractions, as scholars long believed?

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• 2. The Stolen Eye

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  In the Pyramid Texts, one of the earliest sources of Egyptian myth, the Eye of Horus appears in about a quarter of the utterances. These texts date to the late Old Kingdom, roughly 2686-2181 BC. They describe the sky god Horus locked in a struggle with his rival Set. Set steals the eye, and sometimes tramples and eats it. Horus usually takes it back by force. The texts often pair this theft with the loss of Set's testicles, an injury that is healed too.

  Later writers kept returning to the quarrel. In many versions another deity restores the eye, most often Thoth, who is said to have made peace between the rivals. Sometimes Thoth reassembles the eye after Set has torn it to pieces. The Book of the Dead, from the New Kingdom, says Set struck the eye in the form of a black boar.

  The fullest short telling is "The Contendings of Horus and Set," from the late New Kingdom. Here Set tears out both of Horus's eyes and buries them, and by the next morning they have grown into lotuses. The goddess Hathor then restores them by anointing them with the milk of a gazelle. In Papyrus Jumilhac, from early in the Ptolemaic Period, Horus's mother Isis waters the buried eyes, and they grow into the first grape vines.

  The Egyptologist Herman te Velde links the eye to another strand of the feud. In "The Contendings," a golden disk appears on Set's forehead, and Thoth places it on his own head. A passage in the Pyramid Texts says the Eye of Horus came from Set's forehead. Te Velde argues that the disk is the eye. Since Thoth is also a moon deity, it would make sense for him to appear in that form and step in as peacemaker. The lotuses and grape vines hint at where the story goes next, because perfumes, food and drink all came from such plants.

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• 3. Sun, Moon and Venus

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  Many Egyptian texts say that the right eye of Horus was the sun and his left eye the moon. The solar eye and the lunar eye were sometimes matched with the red crown and the white crown of Egypt. Some texts treat the Eye of Horus almost interchangeably with the Eye of Ra, a power of the sun god Ra that is often personified as a goddess. The Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson believes the two eyes slowly separated into a lunar Eye of Horus and a solar Eye of Ra.

  Other scholars push back on the dating. They argue that no text clearly equates the eyes of Horus with the sun and moon until the New Kingdom, around 1550-1070 BC. Rolf Krauss goes further. He proposes that the eye first stood for Venus, as both the morning star and the evening star, and only later became tied to the moon.

  Katja Goebs offers a way out of the argument. She suggests that the Eye of Horus and the Eye of Ra rest on one flexible myth, and she writes that it is more fruitful to think "in terms of a (flexible) myth based on the structural relationship of an Object that is missing, or located far from its owner." In the Eye of Ra stories, a goddess flees Ra and is brought back by another deity. In the Eye of Horus stories, the eye is missing because of the war with Set over the kingship, after the death of Horus's father Osiris.

  The moon link shaped how the healing was described. Restoring the eye was called "filling" it, and the image echoed the waxing moon. Temple texts from the Greco-Roman era say Thoth and fourteen other deities filled the eye with plants and minerals. Those fifteen gods stood for the fifteen days from new moon to full moon.

  From the New Kingdom on, the eye was called the wedjat, meaning the whole, completed or uninjured eye. Nobody can say whether the word names the eye that was destroyed and healed, or the one Set left alone.

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• 4. Offerings for Osiris

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  When Horus became king after Set's defeat, he brought offerings to his dead father Osiris. That gift revived Osiris and sustained him in the afterlife. Among the offerings was Horus's own eye, which Osiris consumed. Egyptians treated this scene as the model for every funerary offering, and for the rites performed for gods in temples. A person giving an offering stood in for Horus, and the god receiving it stood in for Osiris.

  The logic went deeper than imitation. The eye came from Horus, who came from Osiris, so the gift returned to its source. The same held for all offerings, since the gods were responsible for every good that humans offered. In the Egyptian view, life was a force that began with the gods and circulated through the world. Offering rites returned it to them and kept it moving. This restoring power is why the eye also counted as protection against evil.

  Wordplay widened the symbol further. The Egyptian word for eye, jrt, sounded like jrj, the word for act, so the Eye of Horus could stand for any ritual act. It also stood for maat, the order of the cosmos, which depended on the temple cult continuing.

  The calendar tied the eye to the dead as well. The Blacked-out Moon Festival fell on the first of the month, the Monthly Festival on the second day, and the Half-Month Festival came in between the moon's phases. At these festivals the living gave offerings to the dead. From the time of the Coffin Texts in the Middle Kingdom, around 2055-1650 BC, funerary writings followed the sequence of these festivals, and so the waxing moon, alongside the healing of the eye.

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• 5. Medicine and Magic

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  A papyrus now known as the Hearst papyrus casts a physician as "Thoth, the physician of the Eye of Horus." It calls the tool used to measure out medicine "the measure with which Horus measured his eye." These lines show how Egyptian healing worked. Practical treatments and appeals to divine powers sat side by side, and the medical papyri do not clearly separate them.

  In many spells the patient is equated with Horus, so that the patient may be healed as Horus was in the myth. That is why the Eye of Horus turns up so often in them. It was called on in particular to guard against eye disease.

  Papyrus Leiden I 348 takes the idea across the whole body. It matches each part of a person with a deity so that the part is protected. The left eye is assigned to the Eye of Horus.

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• 6. Amulets and Design

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  Horus was shown as a falcon, such as a lanner or a peregrine, or as a man with a falcon's head. The Eye of Horus is a stylized human or falcon eye. It often carries an eyebrow, a dark line trailing from the rear corner, and a cheek marking below the eye. A line also sweeps down and back, ending in a curl or spiral. The cheek marking resembles the one on many falcons. Wilkinson suggests the curling line comes from the face of the cheetah, which Egyptians linked with the sky because its spots looked like stars.

  Amulets in the shape of the wedjat first appeared in the late Old Kingdom and were made until Roman times. The eye was one of the few types commonly found on Old Kingdom mummies. It stayed in wide use for the next two thousand years, even as funerary amulets multiplied. Before the New Kingdom, such amulets tended to sit on the chest. Afterward they were commonly placed over the incision where the internal organs were removed during mummification.

  Makers used faience, glass, gold and semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli. The eye could be openwork, part of a plaque, or little more than an outline with marks for the pupil and brow. In the New Kingdom, a rearing cobra could appear at the front, the rear spiral could become a bird's tail feathers, and the cheek mark could become a bird's leg or a human arm. The cobras and cat features may hint at the Eye of Ra. The Third Intermediate Period, around 1070-664 BC, brought small animals and deities tucked into the gaps of the eye, and eyes grouped in sets of four.

  The symbol also joined larger pieces of jewelry, beside protective signs such as the ankh and the djed. From the thirteenth century BC, glass beads with eye-like spots were strung with wedjat amulets, and they may be the ancestor of the modern nazar bead meant to ward off the evil eye. In dangerous moments such as illness or childbirth, instructions for spells told the practitioner to draw a wedjat on linen or papyrus as a temporary amulet.

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• 7. Coffins, Boats and Neighbors

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  On coffins of the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom, a pair of wedjat eyes was often painted on the left side. Mummies of that time were often turned to face left. That suggests the eyes let the dead person see out of the coffin, though they probably also warded off danger. Painted eyes on the bows of boats may have done two jobs as well, protecting the vessel and helping it see ahead.

  Stelae, the carved stone slabs, often carried wedjat eyes. A winged sun symbol commonly filled the curved top of a stela, and in some periods only deities or kings could appear directly beneath it. Eyes of Horus were placed above the figures of ordinary people instead. Wedjat eyes were also drawn with wings, hovering over kings or gods. One mummy of a woman from the late New Kingdom bears elaborate tattoos, including several wedjat eyes.

  Neighboring cultures borrowed the symbol. In Canaan and Syria during the Middle Bronze Age, it appeared in art but far more rarely than the ankh. Nubia took to it much more. In the Kingdom of Kush, the wedjat was frequent in art of the first millennium BC and the early first millennium AD, a sign of Egypt's strong influence. Eyes are still painted on the bows of ships in many Mediterranean countries, a custom that may descend from the Egyptian boats.

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• 8. The Fraction Puzzle

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  In 1911, the Egyptologist Georg Möller studied New Kingdom votive cubits, inscribed stone objects one cubit long. He noticed that hieroglyphs for pieces of the wedjat eye sat beside similar-looking hieratic signs, a cursive script derived from hieroglyphs. The hieratic signs stood for fractions of a hekat, the basic Egyptian measure of volume. Möller proposed that the eye pieces were the original forms of those signs. The inner corner meant 1/2, the pupil 1/4, the eyebrow 1/8, the outer corner 1/16, the curling line 1/32 and the cheek mark 1/64.

  In 1923, T. Eric Peet objected that the eye-piece hieroglyphs do not appear before the New Kingdom. He thought the fraction signs had a separate origin and were only later reinterpreted as parts of the eye. Even so, Möller's idea went into standard references of the decade, including Ägyptische Grammatik by Adolf Erman and Egyptian Grammar by Alan Gardiner. Gardiner, who also catalogued the eye hieroglyph as sign D10, reasoned that the eye represented fractions because myth said Set tore it apart and it was later made whole. Egyptologists accepted this for decades.

  In 2002, the historian of science and mathematics Jim Ritter analyzed the hieratic signs across Egyptian history. He concluded that "the further back we go the further the hieratic signs diverge from their supposed Horus-eye counterparts." He also argued the votive cubits do not clearly link the eye signs to the fractions, so even Peet's weaker version was unlikely to hold. The debate has not fully settled. The 2014 edition of James P. Allen's introductory book Middle Egyptian still lists the pieces of the wedjat eye as fractions of a hekat.

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