Summary
Sekhmet is an Egyptian goddess with a lioness's head on a woman's body, crowned with the sun disc and the cobra. At Memphis she was worshipped as the consort of Ptah and the mother of Nefertem, the god of the lotus flower. She sends sickness with her arrows and her scorching breath, and she is the one asked for healing, so her priests had a special link with medicine and magic and drove away the demons of disease.
Her story is the Destruction of Mankind in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, and her name is born in it. Ra grew old and people plotted against him; he sent his Eye against them, and it went down as Hathor and killed them in the desert, then came back saying: "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 so the Powerful One, Sekhmet, came into being. The Egyptian plays here on the verb sḫm, to be powerful, to prevail, and her name is made of its letters. She meant to wade in people's blood as far as Hnes, modern Ihnasya. Ra had red ochre brought from Elephantine and put into beer until it looked like human blood, and seven thousand jars of it were poured over the fields in the night. She came in the morning and drank, went back drunk without noticing mankind, and Ra called her "gracious one". In the story the goddess is one with three names: the Eye that Ra sends, the Powerful One when she prevails, and the Gracious One when she drinks and comes home.
What Ra does in the story, kings did in the temples. Amenhotep III made some six hundred statues of Sekhmet; many scholars believe they first stood in his mortuary temple at Kom el-Heitan on the west bank at Thebes, and many were later moved to the temple of Mut at Karnak. They have been shown to form a "litany in stone" that appeased the goddess and asked her not to use her harmful powers, so that the king was kept from illness and evil for a year; there may originally have been 730, one seated and one standing for each day of the year. Metropolitan Museum, Sakhmet statue 15.8.2. In the Kadesh inscription Ramesses II charges his enemies "like Sakhmet in the moment of her rage".
The idea Sekhmet's story turns on is that anger is not killed but appeased. Ra does not fight his Eye; he makes what will please it. The king does not fight disease; he sets up a statue of Sekhmet for each day. The physician is her priest. The force that sickens is the force that heals once it is content, and it is also the force that burns the sun's enemies: in a late text seventy-seven spells are recited over the place where Apophis is executed, "so that his soul is given to the fire and his corpse to the flame of Sakhmet".
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Sḫm.t: s, then ḫ, then m, then the feminine t. Take away the t and sḫm remains, the verb the story plays on. It is Arabic s-kh-m, all three letters and in their order. In Lane, sakhīma and sukhma are rancour, malevolence and anger in the soul; tasakhkhama ʿalayhi is to become angered against someone; sakhkhama al-māʾ is to heat water until it boils; and sukhām is the black crock of a cooking pot. The t of sukhma is the t of Sekhmet. On this reading Sekhmet is al-sukhma, anger held in the soul until it boils, which is what the story makes her: an Eye that says the killing was balm to her heart. The Arabs say al-hadāyā tasullu al-sakhāʾim, "gifts draw out rancours", and a prayer asks, "O God, draw out the rancour, sakhīma, of my heart"; that is what Ra did when he gave her the beer, and her rancour was drawn out and she came back gracious.
Linguistic Root
Al-sukhma
| Form | Meaning | Witness |
|---|---|---|
| Sḫm.t | The goddess's name | Egyptian dictionary |
| sḫm | Verb: to be powerful, to have power over | Egyptian dictionary |
| sḫm | Noun: might, power | Egyptian dictionary |
| sḫm | Sistrum, Hathor's instrument | Egyptian dictionary |
| Sakhmet, Sekhmet | Modern vocalizations |
The comparison needs no shift: s is s, Egyptian ḫ is Arabic kh as in Khepri, m is m, and t is the feminine ending in both languages. The sense differs between the two banks: Egyptian gives power and prevailing, Arabic gives pent-up anger and the heat that brings water to the boil. The story itself joins them: Ra says "I shall have power over them", and the Eye says "it was balm to my heart". Egyptian also writes the name of the sistrum played for Hathor with these letters, so the angry power and the music that appeases it are written alike.
Other readings in the essay
The project's Egyptian essay first reads the name from s-kh-m, which it takes as strength, and from sh-kh-m, to grow intense and angry. Elsewhere it brings it near sakhaṭa and ṣakhama, anger and intensity, and sukhm, blackness and heat, which is what Lane keeps for this very root. In its last section it offers saqima, making Sekhmet "the one who makes sick" and then heals, and ranks it highest in its table. The sense is very close to what she does, and Lane gives asqamahu, he made him sick; but it sets q where Egyptian has ḫ, and ḫ answers kh. So s-kh-m is the name in its letters, and s-q-m is what she does to people. The essay also compares Hebrew שכם, shekhem, "shoulder", which has sh, not s.
Key Mythic Narratives
The protecting mother and the distant Eye
In the Pyramid Texts Sekhmet appears with the lioness Shesemtet as a mother who protects the king. In the Middle Kingdom the lioness's wild face came to dominate in her, while Bastet came to stand for the gentle one. Sekhmet is merged with Tefnut in the stories of the sun's Eye that stays far from Egypt until it is appeased and returns. From the New Kingdom her favourite title was "Sakhmet the Great, beloved of Ptah", and "Sakhmet of Sahure" was worshipped in the mortuary temple of King Sahure into the Greek period.
Memphis
In a love song the lover sails to Memphis to ask Ptah for his beloved and sees the river as if it were wine: "its rushes are Ptah, Sakhmet is its foliage, Iadet its buds, Nefertem its lotus blossoms".
Symbolic Reading
The project's Egyptian essay reads Sekhmet socially: she is the goddess of war and healing, and in her it sees woman as warrior and physician.
The texts make disease something shot like an arrow and breathed out like the hot breath of a lioness, and healing an appeasement of the one who shot it. The Metropolitan Museum's audio commentary on her statue mentions a view that ties Amenhotep III's statues to epidemics in the Near East during his reign, either to ward them off or in thanks for deliverance, and says that physicians were usually her priests. That is an interpretation scholars propose; what the objects themselves show is their number and the sign of life placed in the goddess's hand.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
The Canaanite Resheph sends plague with his arrows as Sekhmet does, Resheph was worshipped in Egypt itself, and the project's Canaanite essay compares him with Sekhmet for plague and wrath. Apollo shoots plague into the Greek army in the Iliad and is then appeased with sacrifice. The project's Babylonian essay sets Erra, god of plague and destruction, beside Sekhmet, and makes Nergal the sender of plagues that rot bodies from within. In the poem Erra and Išum Erra goes to war and the cities of Babylonia are ruined, then his companion Išum calms him, and the poem came to be written on amulets carried against violence and ruin; so Sekhmet's anger is appeased with beer, and her statues keep the king from illness.
A decision in Ra's council to destroy humanity, then a change of mind, brings her story near the flood stories, as Lichtheim says; the difference is that the water that covers the fields in Egypt is red beer that saves people from the Eye's anger.