Seshat

Summary

Seshat is an Egyptian goddess of writing, reckoning, measuring and building; the Global Egyptian Museum calls her in many ways the female counterpart of Thoth. She is shown as a woman wearing her own sign on her head: a star or rosette of seven points with an arc or two downturned horns above it, a symbol not yet explained, and she usually wears a leopard skin over her dress.

Her first work is seen at the founding of a temple. Before a temple is built, the king and Seshat stretch a cord on the ground by which the building is measured, one part of the foundation ceremony; the Egyptians called it pḏ-šs, "stretching the cord". Its oldest image is on a pink granite block from a gate jamb at Kom el-Ahmar, Hierakonpolis, from the reign of Khasekhemwy in the Second Dynasty, where Seshat stands with her sign on her head in a scene of stretching the cord. The Global Egyptian Museum says that from the Old Kingdom on she performed the rite of stretching the cord with the king.

Her second work is writing and counting. In the mortuary temple of Sahure at Abusir, of the Fifth Dynasty, Seshat sits on a throne in her leopard skin and records on a tablet the booty taken in the war with the Libyans. From the New Kingdom she fixed the years of a king's reign and wrote his name on the leaves of the sacred ished tree. Hatshepsut's obelisk at Karnak says: "Her father Amun has established her great name upon the august ished-tree; her annals are millions of years." And the Egyptian sign for "year", rnp.t, is the picture of a notched palm rib, each notch a year.

In the funerary texts the two works come back to one, building. In the Pyramid Texts, spell 364, Nephthys gathers all the dead king's limbs "in this her name of Seshat, Lady of Builders" and makes them whole for him. In chapter 57 of the Book of the Dead the dead man wishes to rest in Heliopolis, "in my house which Seshat built for me, and for whose walls Khnum stood surety". Seshat builds the god's house on earth, and builds the dead man's body and house in the hereafter.

The idea Seshat's image turns on is that writing and building are one work: a line stretched. She stretches the cord on the ground and the temple rises on its line; she draws the line on the writing surface and the count of years and of booty stays. What she writes is not wiped out, because she writes on the tree and on the stone, and so she stands at the temple's foundation and at the king's jubilee alike.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's Egyptian essay does not mention Seshat; the Hindu essay names her as a goddess of writing and wisdom set beside Sarasvatī. Egyptian writes the name Sšꜣ.t: s, š, the Egyptian ꜣ, and the feminine t. In the Middle Kingdom the Egyptian ꜣ answers r and l in Semitic names, which leaves s-š-r, and that is Arabic saṭara: in Lane, saṭr is a line of writing, and a line or row of buildings and of trees, and a misṭara is the instrument with which a book is ruled, a board of pasteboard with strings strained across it. On this reading Seshat is "she who draws the line", who lines the book and lines the building with a stretched string, which are her two works in the images.

Linguistic Root

"She who draws the line"

Magdolen says the precise etymology of the name is unknown and that it is generally translated "the female scribe". That translation takes the name from the Egyptian verb for writing, zẖꜣ, which has other letters: z, Egyptian ẖ and ꜣ, while the name has s, š and ꜣ. The Egyptian dictionary keeps them apart. The Pyramid Texts also name a male god with the same letters, Sšꜣ.w, so the name is an epithet with a feminine and a masculine form.

The proposed reading matches the letters like this. S is s. The Egyptian ꜣ is r: Peust says it was a liquid, which renders Semitic r and l in Semitic names written in Egyptian in the Middle Kingdom. The t is the feminine ending, as in Arabic al-sāṭira. In the Semitic family the same root is a word for writing: Akkadian šaṭāru, "to write", and Hebrew šōṭēr, the official, whose original sense Brown-Driver-Briggs suggests may be "scribe" or "arranger, organizer". The šōṭerim of Exodus 5:14–19 are officers in Egypt held to account for the count of bricks.

The Arabic sense joins Seshat's two works: saṭr is the line of writing and also the row of buildings and of palm trees, and the misṭara is strings strained on a board on which lines are ruled. Stretching the cord for a temple's foundation is lining the ground, and writing the years is lining the tree and the stone.

The limit of the reading is that Egyptian š stands where Arabic has ṭ, and no second Egyptian-Semitic pair with š for ṭ is yet known.

Symbolic Reading

Seshat's work is fixing: she fixes the limits of a temple before it is built, the number of years before they pass, and what was taken in war after it ends. She is the image of the reckoning and writing that king and temple need. She sits in her leopard skin with a seven-pointed star on her head, so that her image itself joins the ground she measures and the sky she looks to.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Sumer has a goddess who joins writing and measuring as Seshat does: Nisaba, "chief scribe of An" and record-keeper of Enlil, on whose knees Enki places the lapis-lazuli tablet so that she may consult "the holy tablet of the heavenly stars". Both are scribes, and both look to the stars: Nisaba in her tablet, Seshat with the star on her head.

In Egypt itself Thoth stands with her: he is the gods' scribe and the reckoner of the moon, she the recorder of the king's years and the surveyor of his temple.

The project's Hindu essay sets Seshat beside Sarasvatī, the Indian goddess of speech and learning, both being goddesses of writing and wisdom. They differ in origin: Sarasvatī was a river before she was the goddess of speech, while Seshat is cord and book from her oldest images.

Among the Greeks knowledge is kept in song: the Muses, daughters of Memory, know what was and what will be and teach it to poets, while Seshat keeps it in writing and counting; see the Muses.