Hathor

Summary

Hathor is an Egyptian goddess drawn as a cow, or as a woman with a cow's horns and the sun disc between them; her face alone, with a cow's ears, appears on sistra and on the column capitals of her temple at Dendera, the greatest centre of her worship. For the Egyptians she is the mother of the reigning king, since the king is Horus, the lady of love and music, and the cow of the sky who gives birth to the sun every day. In funerary papyri she comes out of the western mountain as a cow among the papyrus plants to receive the dead.

Her best-known story is the Destruction of Mankind, the first part of the Book of the Heavenly Cow inscribed in New Kingdom royal tombs. Ra grew old and people plotted against him; he gathered his council in secret, and Nun advised him to send his Eye against them. The Eye went down as Hathor and killed people in the desert. When she came back Ra said to her: "Come in peace, Hathor, Eye who did what I came for!" She answered: "As you live for me, I have overpowered mankind, and it was balm to my heart." Ra said: "I shall have power over them as king by diminishing them", and from this word came Sekhmet, "the Powerful One". Then Ra wanted to spare the rest. He sent messengers to Elephantine for red ochre, the high priest of On ground it, maidservants crushed barley for beer, the ochre was put into the beer until it looked like human blood, and seven thousand jars were made. In the night they were poured over the fields where she meant to kill, flooding them three palms deep. When she came in the morning she found the fields flooded and liked what she saw; she drank, her heart was glad, and she went back drunk without having noticed mankind. Ra said to her: "Come in peace, gracious one!", and from this word came the beautiful women of the town of Imu.

She has two moments in the Contendings of Horus and Seth. A god insulted Ra in the council, and he went to his pavilion and lay on his back, sore at heart and alone, for a whole day. Hathor, Lady of the Southern Sycamore, came and stood before her father and uncovered her nakedness to him; he laughed, got up, sat with the council again and told the two rivals to speak. And when Seth had torn out Horus's eyes, Hathor found Horus weeping in the desert, caught a gazelle, milked it, and put the milk in his eyes, and they were healed. Lichtheim II, pp. 216 and 219. The Dendera hymns call her "Wife of Horus", and Horus of Edfu travelled at the great festivals to visit her at Dendera, where their son Harsomtus, also called Ihy, was born.

The idea Hathor's stories turn on is that the force that kills is the same force that, once pleased, becomes grace and joy. Ra does not fight his Eye or drive it away; he gives it drink until it is drunk and content, and it comes back "gracious". And it is she who makes him laugh when he is sulking, so that he returns to his council. Her worship re-enacted the story with human hands. A hymn at Medamud calls her: "Come, oh Golden One.. the procession is in the place of inebriation", and names the royal children pacifying her with what she desires, the drunken celebrants drumming for her in the cool of the night, and the girls with garlands; the hymn of the Seven Hathors at Dendera calls her "lady of drunkenness without end"; and at Dendera the king comes to dance and sing before her and offers her a jug of wine. In the love songs she is "the Golden One", whom the lover asks to send his beloved to him.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Ḥw.t-Ḥr.w, a compound of two words: ḥw.t, a large house, estate or temple, ending in the feminine t, and Ḥr.w, the name of Horus. In Egyptian itself the name means "House of Horus", and the same phrase also names Horus's temple at Edfu. Take away the t and ḥw remains, which is Arabic ḥawā: to gather and hold together; al-ḥiwāʾ is a cluster of houses near one another, as we read it in the name of Nephthys, rabbat al-ḥiwāʾ. And Ḥr remains, Arabic al-ḥurr, the falcon and the free-born, as we read it in the name of Horus. On this reading Hathor is ḥiwāʾ al-ḥurr, the dwelling that holds the falcon. That is what the stories make her: the cow of the sky in which the falcon flies and from which the sun is born each morning, the mother from whom the king who is Horus comes, and the wife whom Horus visits in her house at Dendera.

Linguistic Root

Ḥiwāʾ al-ḥurr

The Egyptian ḥ of ḥw.t is Arabic ḥ, w is w, and the t is the feminine ending, removed as it is from nb.t in the name of Nephthys. What remains is ḥw, Arabic ḥawā once its final weak letter drops. Lane gives ḥawā as to gather, comprise and possess, and al-ḥiwāʾ as a number of houses near together, or the houses of a people at a water. The sense of the Egyptian word, a large house, estate or temple, is the sense of the Arabic one: a place that holds its people. Ḥr.w is al-ḥurr; Lisān al-ʿArab says "the ḥurr is the falcon", and the ḥurr is also the opposite of the slave; the w written after the r is the point still open in the reading of Horus's name.

Her name stayed in the calendar. The third month of the Egyptian inundation season is named after her, and from it comes the Coptic month ϩⲁⲑⲱⲣ, Hatour. Plutarch writes that Osiris was shut in the chest on the seventeenth of Athyr, the month of Hathor.

Other readings in the essay

The project's Egyptian essay reads the name as ḥatt and ḥawr, taking ḥatt as "house" and ḥawr as light or watching. It agrees with us in meaning, "House of Horus", but ḥatt is not an Arabic word for house, and the t of the Egyptian word is a feminine ending, not a root letter. The essay also compares Hebrew חתן, ḥātān, "bridegroom", which has an n the name lacks, and an Akkadian word "hate", "house", for which we found no witness. The project's other Egyptian essay places Hathor among the goddesses of love, music and drunkenness.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Seven Hathors

Hathor appears as seven at a birth, to decree the newborn's fate. In the Doomed Prince the Hathors come to the king's newborn son and say: he will die through the crocodile, or the snake, or the dog. In the Two Brothers Ra asks Khnum to fashion a wife for Bata so that he will not live alone; Khnum makes her more beautiful than any woman in the land, and the Seven Hathors come to see her and say with one voice: she will die by the knife.

Beyond Egypt

Hathor was worshipped in Nubia, at Byblos and in Sinai, where a temple was built for her as "Lady of Turquoise" at the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim; another of her titles was "Lady of Faience". Global Egyptian Museum, Hathor. Herodotus calls the goddess of the town of Atarbechis, whose name is probably taken from Hathor's, "Aphrodite", in the passage where he says that cows are the most sacred of all cattle in Egypt.

Angry and gracious

A text about Hathor of Dendera calls her "angry like Sakhmet, sweet like Bastet", putting her two faces into two names: the angry lioness and the gentle cat. Global Egyptian Museum, Bastet. Her instrument in worship is the sistrum, and Egyptian names one kind of sistrum sḫm, with the letters of Sekhmet's name.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian essay reads Hathor socially: she is the goddess of love, music and drunkenness, and in her it sees that woman in Egyptian myth holds the right to pleasure.

In the texts themselves the Eye's anger is pacified with what people make from their fields: beer from barley, ochre from the soil of Elephantine, dancing, drums and garlands. A hymn on a doorpost of the Dendera temple says that Hathor makes the flood flow in its season without calamities, makes the watered earth close over the seed, and makes people work in joy and reap in joy. The goddess who nearly destroyed mankind is the one asked at Dendera to bring the water on time and bring the crops out of the ground.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

A decision in Ra's council to destroy humanity, then a change of mind, puts Hathor's story among the flood stories, and Lichtheim says its theme, human wickedness arousing divine wrath and the partial destruction of mankind, is the theme of the Mesopotamian and Biblical flood stories. The difference is that in the Egyptian story the water drowns no one; it saves: red beer floods the fields and makes the Eye drunk. The secret council around Ra meets as the divine council meets in other stories of the ancient Near East.

Lichtheim says the Dendera hymns show the aspect that made Hathor the counterpart of Aphrodite: the golden goddess of love, worshipped with wine, music and dancing, which is what Herodotus did when he called the goddess of Atarbechis Aphrodite. The project's Babylonian essay sets her with Ishtar and Isis for womanhood and motherhood; Ishtar, like her, joins love to war.

Horus of Edfu's visit to his wife at Dendera, and the birth of their son in the birth house, are an Egyptian witness to the sacred marriage. The Eye of Ra that grows angry, is pacified and returns is also Tefnut in the story of the Solar Eye, who went to Nubia in anger and came back.