Mut

Summary

Mut is the great goddess of Thebes, wife of Amun and mother of Khonsu, the three being known as the Theban triad. The Global Egyptian Museum says her role is above all that of the divine mother, like Isis and Hathor, that the ruling pharaoh was often presented as her son, and that many amulets show her suckling her son. She is shown as a woman wearing a vulture headdress with the double crown or the white crown above it, and also with the head of a lioness.

Her house is at Karnak, south of Amun's temple, with a crescent-shaped sacred lake called Jšr.w, Isheru. One of her titles is "Mut, Lady of Isheru, Mistress of Heaven, Mistress of All the Gods". On Isheru her barque was rowed at her feasts: a school text in Papyrus Lansing says to the teacher, "you are one who embraces the sound Eye for Mut, Mistress of Heaven, on the first day she is rowed on Isheru". A mythological handbook of the Delta in a Brooklyn papyrus says that the goddess, the Eye of Ra, was rowed in a boat of white oryx hide on the Isheru canal when she was rescued from Seth. Global Egyptian Museum, Karnak, Egyptian dictionary, Isheru, Mut.

She was the king's mother. On a stela from Amenhotep III's mortuary temple Amun says to the king: "My son, of my body, my beloved Nebmare, my living image.. Born me by Mut, Ashru's Lady in Thebes, Mistress of the Nine Bows, who nursed you to be sole lord of peoples!" In the seventh century BCE Montemhet, governor of Thebes, says: "I have renewed the temple of Mut-the-Great, Ashru's mistress, so that it is more beautiful than before; I adorned her bark with electrum." Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature II, pp. 46–47, Lichtheim III, p. 33.

Mut has another face. The Global Egyptian Museum says she had an aggressive side resembling Sekhmet and Tefnut: all three were bloodthirsty lionesses associated with the eye of the sun god, a fire-spitting creature that devours his enemies. Hence the many statues of Sekhmet set up by Amenhotep III were found in the forecourt of Mut's temple, and inscriptions from her temple call her "Mut, Lady of Isheru-Bastet" and "Lady of Isheru-Sakhmet".

From this face comes the festival of drunkenness. In the story of the Heavenly Cow Ra sends his Eye to kill mankind, then gives her beer red as blood so that she grows drunk and comes back calm. At Mut's temple Betsy Bryan's excavation found in 2004 sandstone column drums buried beneath the temple porch, five of them inscribed: "The King of Upper and Lower Egypt Maatkare. She made it as a monument for her mother Mut, Lady of Isheru, making for her a columned hall or porch of drunkenness anew." Maatkare is Queen Hatshepsut. Betsy Bryan finds six elements in the festivals of drunkenness: a lioness or Hathoric goddess as the Eye of Ra who keeps or avenges the sun god's order; communal ritual; drinking beer or wine to reach an altered state; drunkenness together with sexual behaviour; an ecstatic vision of the goddess; and a request made to her during the vision. She concludes that the feast of 20 Thoth and the Beautiful Feast of the Valley were celebrated as feasts of drunkenness, first at Mut's temple and then in western Thebes.

The idea Mut turns on is that the mother who nurses the king is the same lioness who kills his enemies. Anger is not driven out of her image; it is given drink and grows calm, and it grows calm in her own place, by the lake of Isheru, turning back into tenderness.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Mw.t, which is the Egyptian word mw.t for "mother" itself, as the Egyptian dictionary says. The project's Egyptian essay offers three readings, mawt, "death", umm, "mother", and māta in the sense "extended, filled", grading them "high". The reading umm gives the whole Egyptian meaning, and Lane gives a form of the word for mother with the feminine t, as in the Egyptian name: "umm, imm, umma and ummaha: mother". The reading mawt gives all the letters, m, w and t, which are the letters of the Egyptian verb mwt, "to die", a different word written with the same consonants. In its letters the name recalls death, in its meaning it is the mother, and the goddess herself is mother and lioness.

Linguistic Root

The mother

The Egyptian essay gives the name Mut three readings graded "high": from mawt, death; from umm, since the name may mean mother; or from māta in the sense "extended, filled". It compares Hebrew ʾēm and Arabic umm, and says Mut stands for motherhood and the cosmic womb.

The first two readings hit two different things. "Mother" is the meaning of the Egyptian name itself, not a guess, since mw.t in the Egyptian dictionary is "mother", as in Coffin Texts 227, "my father is Geb, my mother is Nut". The mother word is shared in the Semitic family: Arabic umm, Hebrew ʾēm, Assyrian ummu, as Brown-Driver-Briggs notes. Lane gives a form of it with the feminine t, umma, so that the Egyptian name would be umma without the glottal stop, the Egyptian w standing where the u is. The limit of this reading is that the Semitic word has a doubled m, while Egyptian has m followed by w, and no glottal stop.

Mawt gives the three letters as they stand, and they are the letters of the Egyptian verb mwt, "to die", and of the noun mwt, death and the dead, a root shared by Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew and Akkadian, as on the Ammit page. But the Egyptian dictionary keeps the word for mother and the word for death apart. So this reading reads the letters, while the meaning is "mother". The goddess joined both: the mother who nurses the king, and the lioness who is Ra's killing Eye. The reading māta, "extended", finds no support in Lane, where mawt is the going of life, and "the wind died" means it became still.

Key Mythic Narratives

Mut and Taweret at Deir el-Medina

The Metropolitan Museum has a painted limestone stela from Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb-builders, from the reign of Amenhotep III, titled "Stela with Taweret and Mut of Isheru". The great mother of Karnak stands in the workers' houses beside Taweret, guardian of birth.

Mut's barque in procession

Bakenkhons, high priest of Amun, says on his statue: "I built great processional barques on the river for Amun, Mut and Khons." Mut went out with her husband and son in their barques to the west bank at the Feast of the Valley.

Symbolic Reading

The Egyptian rereading essay says the Egyptians used the images of their gods as tools for explaining the cosmos. Mut's image explains something every household knows: a mother protects with tenderness and with anger together, and anger, once directed, is directed at the enemy. The vulture on her head spreads its wings over the king, and the lioness head of her other images faces his foes.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Sumer the chief god's wife and the moon's mother is Ninlil, wife of Enlil and mother of Nanna, with her temple Ekiur at Nippur, as Mut is Amun's wife and the mother of Khonsu the moon, with her temple at Karnak beside his. Both goddesses stand in the chief god's city as his wife and the moon's mother.

In Egypt itself Mut meets Sekhmet, who grew drunk on red beer and came back, Hathor, lady of drunkenness, and Bastet, the Eye of Ra grown calm. She stands with Taweret in the houses of Deir el-Medina. Her motherhood of the king answers Isis's motherhood of Horus.