Hathor

• 1. Introduction

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  Hathor was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion, and she may be the most difficult deity in that tradition to pin down with a single description. Her Egyptian name, ḥwt-ḥr, is typically translated as "house of Horus" but can equally mean "my house is the sky". She was a sky goddess, a solar deity, a goddess of music and drunkenness, a protector of miners in the Sinai Peninsula, a guide to the dead, and the symbolic mother of every pharaoh who ever ruled Egypt. More temples were dedicated to her than to any other Egyptian goddess. Her most prominent temple, at Dendera in Upper Egypt, still stands today as one of the best-preserved examples of ancient Egyptian architecture.

  How did a single goddess come to occupy so many roles at once? And what did the Egyptians believe they were doing when they drank themselves into a sacred stupor at her festivals? Those questions run through the story of Hathor from her earliest cattle-goddess predecessors in the fourth millennium BC all the way to the last centuries of ancient Egyptian religion.

• 2. Origins in Cattle and Sky

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  Images of cattle appear frequently in the artwork of Predynastic Egypt, before roughly 3100 BC, alongside images of women with upraised, curved arms that echo the shape of bovine horns. The Gerzeh Palette, a stone palette from the Naqada II period of prehistory, roughly 3500-3200 BC, shows the silhouette of a cow's head with inward-curving horns surrounded by stars. That palette connects the cow with the sky, just as several later goddesses, including Hathor, Mehet-Weret, and Nut, would be.

  Hathor herself is not unambiguously attested until the Fourth Dynasty, roughly 2613-2494 BC, although some earlier artifacts may refer to her. When she does clearly appear, her horns curve outward, a detail that separates her from the inward-curving horns seen in Predynastic images. A bovine deity with inward-curving horns appears on the Narmer Palette from near the very start of Egyptian history. The Egyptologist Henry George Fischer argued that figure is Bat, a goddess later depicted with a woman's face and inward-curling horns. The Egyptologist Lana Troy, however, read a passage in the Pyramid Texts that links Hathor with the apron of the king, mirroring the goddess on Narmer's garments, and argued the Narmer Palette figure is Hathor rather than Bat.

  By the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor rose rapidly. She displaced an early crocodile god as the patron deity of Dendera, and she absorbed the cult of Bat in the neighboring region of Hu so thoroughly that, by the Middle Kingdom, roughly 2055-1650 BC, the two deities had merged entirely. The Old Kingdom's theological emphasis on Ra as king of the gods and father of the earthly king drew Hathor upward as well. She became Ra's mythological wife, and through that union, the divine mother of every pharaoh.

• 3. The Eye of Ra

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  Ra was sometimes portrayed inside the disk of the sun, which the Egyptologist Lana Troy interprets as placing the eye goddess in the role of a womb from which the sun god was born. Hathor's seemingly contradictory positions as mother, wife, and daughter of Ra all reflected the daily solar cycle. At sunset the god entered the body of the sky goddess, fathering the deities born from her at sunrise; among those deities was the eye goddess herself, who then gave birth to him again, a loop of constant regeneration.

  The Eye of Ra was also a weapon. Hathor could become the lioness Sekhmet and rampage on Ra's behalf. The most vivid account of this appears in the funerary text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow. Ra sends Hathor as his Eye to punish humans for plotting rebellion. She becomes Sekhmet and massacres the rebels, but Ra decides to spare the rest of humanity. He orders beer to be dyed red and poured across the land. The goddess drinks it, mistaking it for blood, and in her inebriated state reverts to the benign and beautiful Hathor.

  A related set of myths, known from the New Kingdom onward, centers on the Distant Goddess. The Eye goddess rebels against Ra's control and rampages freely in Libya or Nubia. Weakened by the loss of his Eye, Ra sends another god, often Thoth, to coax her back. Once pacified, she returns as the consort of Ra or of the god who retrieved her. The Egyptologist Carolyn Graves-Brown notes that this two-sided character, violent and dangerous versus beautiful and joyful, reflected the Egyptian belief that women encompassed both extreme passions of fury and love. A form called Hathor of the Four Faces, represented by a set of four cobras facing each cardinal direction, watched perpetually for threats to the sun god.

• 4. Music, Drunkenness, and the Festival Life

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  Temple reliefs at Hathor's sanctuaries show musicians playing tambourines, harps, lyres, and sistra in her honor. The sistrum, a rattle-like instrument, held particular importance in her worship. Sistra carried erotic connotations and alluded to the creation of new life, so the instrument was simultaneously festive and cosmological.

  Many of Hathor's annual festivals were celebrated with drinking and dancing that served a ritual purpose. The Egyptologist Carolyn Graves-Brown suggests that celebrants at her festivals aimed to reach an altered state of consciousness, which was otherwise rare or nonexistent in ancient Egyptian religion, to allow them to interact with the divine realm. The Festival of Drunkenness, commemorating the return of the Eye of Ra, was celebrated on the twentieth day of the month of Thout. Known from as early as the Middle Kingdom, its fullest descriptions come from Ptolemaic and Roman times. The dancing, eating, and drinking during that festival represented the direct opposite of the sorrow, hunger, and thirst the Egyptians associated with death.

  A hymn to the goddess Raet-Tawy as a form of Hathor at the temple of Medamud describes the scene of her mythic return to Egypt: women carry bouquets of flowers, drunken revelers play drums, and people and animals from foreign lands dance for her as she enters the festival booth. The best-documented of all her festivals was the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, a Ptolemaic celebration lasting fourteen days in the month of Epiphi. Hathor's cult image from Dendera was carried by boat to several temple sites and finally to the Temple of Horus at Edfu, where the statue of Hathor from Dendera met that of Horus of Edfu. Barbara Richter argues the festival represented a ritual marriage, the rejuvenation of primordial buried gods, and the return of the Distant Goddess all at once. She points out that the birth of Hathor and Horus's son Ihy was celebrated at Dendera nine months after this reunion.

• 5. Goddess of Foreign Lands and Mines

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  Hathor was closely linked to lands and goods beyond Egypt's borders, partly because her role as a sky goddess connected her with stars and navigation, and partly because she was believed to protect ships on the Nile and the seas beyond. Egypt maintained trade relations with the coastal cities of Syria and Canaan, particularly Byblos, and the Egyptians began to equate the patron goddess of that city, Baalat Gebal, with Hathor. The connection grew strong enough that texts from Dendera stated she resided in Byblos. After the New Kingdom's collapse, Egypt's trade links to Byblos weakened, and by the time the Greek writer Plutarch wrote his work On Isis and Osiris in the 2nd century AD, Isis had entirely supplanted Hathor in that city.

  The autobiography of Harkhuf, an official in the Sixth Dynasty, roughly 2345-2181 BC, describes his expedition to a land in or near Nubia, from which he brought back ebony, panther skins, and incense. The text describes those exotic goods as Hathor's gift to the pharaoh. Egyptian gold-mining expeditions in Nubia introduced her cult to the region, and New Kingdom pharaohs built several temples to her there. Amenhotep III built a temple at Sedeinga celebrating his queen Tiye as a manifestation of female deities including Hathor, and Ramesses II did the same for his queen Nefertari at the Small Temple of Abu Simbel.

• 6. Guide to the Dead

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  Hathor crossed the boundary between the living world and the Duat, the realm of the dead. She helped the spirits of deceased humans enter the Duat and was closely associated with the necropolises on the west bank of the Nile, which were personified as Imentet, the goddess of the west, who was frequently seen as a manifestation of Hathor. The Theban necropolis, for instance, was often portrayed as a stylized mountain with the cow of Hathor emerging from it.

  Coffins, tombs, and the underworld itself were interpreted as the womb of the sky goddess, from which the deceased soul would be reborn like the sun god. In the Third Intermediate Period, roughly 1070-664 BC, Egyptians began to add Hathor's name to that of deceased women in place of Osiris's name. Some women were called "Osiris-Hathor", indicating they drew on the revivifying power of both deities.

  In the early New Kingdom, Hathor was one of the three deities most commonly found in royal tomb decoration, alongside Osiris and Anubis. Old Kingdom tomb reliefs show men and women performing a ritual called "shaking the papyrus". The significance of this rite is not fully known, but inscriptions sometimes say it was performed "for Hathor", and the rustling sound made by shaking papyrus stalks may have been likened to the rattling of a sistrum. The link between Hathor and deceased women was maintained from the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom all the way into the Roman Period, the last stage of ancient Egyptian religion before its extinction.

• 7. Icons and the Priesthood

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  Hathor's most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk, often with a red or turquoise sheath dress, or a dress combining both colors. Because Isis adopted the same headdress during the New Kingdom, the two goddesses can be distinguished only when labeled in writing. She could also appear as a lioness, a cobra, a domestic cat, or a sycamore tree, and her face sometimes took the form of a frontal human face with bovine ears, placed on the capitals of columns. The Hathoric column, used in many temples dedicated to her and other goddesses, could bear two or four such faces, which may reflect the duality of the goddess's aspects or the watchfulness of Hathor of the Four Faces.

  In the Old Kingdom, most priests of Hathor, including those of the highest ranks, were women, and many of them were members of the royal family. In the course of the Middle Kingdom, women were increasingly excluded from the highest priestly positions, even as queens became more closely tied to Hathor's cult. Non-royal women disappeared from the upper ranks of her priesthood, though women continued to serve as musicians and singers throughout Egyptian temple life.

  Sneferu, the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, may have built a temple to Hathor, and Neferhetepes, a daughter of the pharaoh Djedefra, was the first recorded priestess of Hathor. Hatshepsut, who ruled as pharaoh in the early New Kingdom, used names and titles linking her to several goddesses including Hathor to legitimize her rule in what was normally a male position. She placed her mortuary temple, which incorporated a chapel dedicated to Hathor, at Deir el-Bahari, a cult site of the goddess since the Middle Kingdom. Women praying for children were among the most common private worshippers, and the only known surviving birth brick from ancient Egypt is decorated with an image of a woman holding her child, flanked by images of Hathor.