Summary
Khnum is an Egyptian god with a ram's head; his horns stretch out sideways and twist, those of the breed of ram the Egyptians first domesticated, which died out in the New Kingdom. He was lord of the cataract region in the south, and his chief temples were at Elephantine, the island in the Nile opposite Aswan, where he was worshipped with Satet and Anuqet, and at Esna, where he was worshipped with Neith.
His story is the potter's story. Egyptians said that Khnum forms a person and his double, the ka, on the potter's wheel, makes the child in its mother's womb, and attends the birth with Heqet. In the temple of Esna a great hymn, sung at the feast of "installing the potter's wheel", calls him "God of the potter's wheel, who settled the land by his handiwork": he fashioned gods and men, flocks and herds, birds and fishes; he knotted the flow of blood to the bones, built the skull, opened the eyes, hollowed the ears and formed the tongue to speak. Then it says: "Formed all on his potter's wheel, their speech differs in each region", and "Without pause henceforth the wheel turns every day." In the Two Brothers Ra asks Khnum to fashion a wife for Bata so that he will not live alone, and Khnum makes her more beautiful than any woman in the land.
He is also the lord of the water. Egyptians held that the Nile came out of Nun through a hole in the earth at Elephantine, that the flood entered Egypt there with its silt, and that Khnum guarded this source. On a rock on the island of Sehel, near Elephantine, Ptolemaic priests carved the "Famine Stela" and attributed it to the Old Kingdom king Djoser. In it the king says that the Nile had failed to come in time for seven years: grain was scant, every man robbed his twin, and the temples were shut. He asked a priest of Imhotep: where is the Nile born? The priest came back from the sacred books with the answer: in the midst of the water is a town called Yebu, Elephantine; "Twin Caverns" is the water's name; there the Nile sleeps, and Khnum rules there, his sandals resting on the flood and the door bolt in his hand, opening the gate as he wishes. The king made offerings, and as he slept he saw Khnum standing before him, saying: "I am Khnum, your maker.. Fashioner of everybody.. When I open up the well.. I shall make Hapy gush for you, no year of lack and want anywhere." The king woke and granted Khnum's temple the land for twelve iter south of Elephantine, an iter being about ten and a half kilometres, and a tenth of what came from Nubia. Lichtheim judges that Khnum's own priests wrote the inscription, to strengthen their rights to this land against the priests of Isis at Philae.
The idea that joins Khnum's two faces is that the potter and the river are one work. The clay from which he makes people on his wheel is what the flood brings when he opens the gate for it, and the land that starves when the Nile is late is fed when Khnum is content. That is why the Global Egyptian Museum suggests that his link with the water and the silt is what made him a potter. And in the Esna hymn the wheel never stops: each newborn is made by his hand as the first people were.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it H̱nm.w; the w after the dot is an ending, as in the name of Atum, which leaves ẖnm. Egyptian has verbs with these letters: ẖnm meaning to join and unite, and to build and construct, and a noun for household members and dependants. The project's Egyptian essay reads the name as Arabic ghanam and calls this its closest reading. N is n, m is m, and the project's laws group ʿayn, ḥ, kh and gh together as throat sounds. In Lane ghanam is sheep and goats together, a collective noun with no singular from its own letters; ghanam mughnama is sheep collected together in numbers; and ghunm is what is obtained without trouble. On this reading Khnum is the lord of the flock: the ram who leads the gathered herd, whom the morning hymn at Esna calls "ram great of majesty" and "leader of herdsmen", and from whom people gain the flood without toil when he opens the gate. The reading also meets the Egyptian verb itself, for ẖnm is to join and gather, and ghanam is the gathered flock. Egyptian ẖ usually answers Arabic kh, as in the name of Khepri, so setting gh in its place is the open point of this reading.
Linguistic Root
"Lord of the flock"
| Form | Meaning | Witness |
|---|---|---|
| H̱nm.w | The god's name | Egyptian dictionary |
| ẖnm | To join, unite | Egyptian dictionary |
| ẖnm | To build, construct | Egyptian dictionary |
| ẖnm | Household members, dependants | Egyptian dictionary |
| H̱nm.ww | "The makers", the group of Khnum gods | Egyptian dictionary |
| nb-nḥp | "Lord of the potter's wheel", a title of Khnum | Egyptian dictionary |
The Egyptian word has three root letters: ẖ, the h with a line beneath, then n and m. Its two Egyptian senses, joining and building, agree with the potter's work of joining clay and building a body from it, and the Esna hymn says of Khnum that he "joins in secret, builds soundly". Lane gives ghanima, to obtain spoil; ghunm, acquiring a thing without trouble; ghanam, sheep and goats together; and ghanam mughnama, a flock collected in numbers. The Arabic root holds the gathered flock and the gain that comes without toil; the Egyptian holds joining and building.
The project's laws put ʿayn, ḥ, kh and gh into one "guttural collapse", a group whose letters alternate and drop when a word passes into other languages. That is what the match of Egyptian ẖ with Arabic gh rests on; the usual correspondence between Egyptian and Arabic is kh for kh.
Other readings in the essay
The Egyptian essay first offers khanama, to make, carve and shape, which matches every letter, but the Arabic dictionaries know kh-n-m only in a place name, Takhnim, in a verse of Labīd. Then khanna, which it takes as enclosing, adding elsewhere that the khann is the nose of a great ram; in Lane khanīn is a sound made through the nose, and the root has no m. Then k-n-m, for which we find no Arabic sense. Then khammara, to knead, since Khnum kneads man from clay, but its letters are kh, m and r and do not answer the n. The essay also compares Hebrew חנה, ḥānā, tenderness, which has ḥ, not kh.
Key Mythic Narratives
The potter in the birth houses
In the birth houses attached to the Ptolemaic temples of Dendera, Edfu and Philae a series of scenes shows the divine child conceived, then shaped by Khnum on his potter's wheel, then presented to his father. The same scenes are in the birth room of the Luxor temple, where Amenhotep III is shaped, and at Deir el-Bahari, where Hatshepsut is. For the Egyptians the king is made on Khnum's wheel as the divine child is.
The name of Khufu
The full name of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, is H̱nm.w-ḫwi̯=f-wj, "Khnum protects me".
The potter in wisdom
In the Instruction of Amenemope, speaking of the hot-tempered man, the sage says: "If only Khnum came to him, the Potter to the heated man, so as to knead the faulty heart." For him the heart is clay that can be kneaded again.
Khnum in the faces of the gods
The Esna hymn says that Khnum is "Ptah-Tatenen, creator of creators", that at Elephantine he is the "Ba of Re" and at Esna the "Ba of Shu", shaping people on his wheel in every city. In the morning hymn he is called "Khnum-Amun" and "Shu, strong-armed". The ram in Egyptian is bꜣ, the same word as the manifest soul, which is why Ra is drawn ram-headed on his night journey.
The sources of the Nile in Herodotus
In the fifth century BCE Herodotus heard from the recorder of Neith's treasury at Sais that between Syene and Elephantine stand two sharp-peaked hills called Crophi and Mophi, from between which rise the bottomless springs of the Nile, half flowing north to Egypt and half south to Ethiopia. Herodotus thought the man was joking. Lichtheim connects these two hills with two elevations in the river before Elephantine described in the Famine Stela, so the late Greek report echoes an older Egyptian picture.
Symbolic Reading
The project's Hindu essay sets Khnum beside Brahma the creator and says their function is one: creating and shaping. In the Egyptian texts themselves Khnum works with tools every village on the Nile knew: the potter's wheel, the clay the flood leaves behind, and the flock. The Famine Stela makes hunger the result of the water's delay and plenty the result of Khnum's favour, and ends with land granted to his temple and a tenth taken from fishermen, hunters and workers, so religious story and economic account share one inscription. Lichtheim's note says that seven years of famine was a common theme in the literatures of the ancient Near East and was once linked with Joseph's years in Genesis.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
In China Nüwa kneads yellow earth and shapes people by hand one at a time, and in the Sumerian Enki and Ninmah humans are made from clay above the Abzu to carry the gods' labour, as told under Enki. Khnum shares the material and the hand with both, and differs in that he does not make people once at the beginning but shapes every newborn on a wheel that never stops. The Qur'an says: "He created man from clay like pottery", so man there is dried clay like earthenware, and the creator is God.
For him the Nile comes out of the primordial waters, Nun, through two caverns at Elephantine, and in the Famine Stela Khnum calls himself "Exalted Nun, who first came forth".