Wadjet and Nekhbet

Summary

Wadjet and Nekhbet are the Egyptians' "Two Ladies", two goddesses who guard Egypt and its king. Wadjet is the cobra, lady of the north, the Delta; her city was Buto in the north-western Delta, once two neighbouring towns called Pe and Dep, and its Greek name comes from the Egyptian for "House of Wadjet". Nekhbet is the vulture, lady of the south; her city was Nekheb on the east bank of the Nile south of Luxor, today el-Kab, facing Nekhen on the west bank, which the Greeks called Hierakonpolis, "city of the falcon". Each pair of facing towns was the capital of one half of Egypt. Together the two goddesses sat on the king's brow, cobra and vulture, the sign that he ruled both lands, and one of his five names was the "Two Ladies name", written after their image. Wadjet is the Red Crown, the crown of the north; Nekhbet is drawn as a vulture with outspread wings holding the ring of eternity in her claws, and sometimes as a cobra wearing the White Crown of the south.

Their oldest mention is in the Pyramid Texts. In the Cannibal Hymn the king rises in the sky and eats the hearts of the gods: "He has eaten the Red, swallowed the Green", the Red being the Red Crown and the Green Wadjet. In spells 220 and 221 the king comes to the Red Crown and the uraeus and calls them "Great One, Great-in-magic", saying: "Make the terror of him like the terror of you, make the awe of him like the awe of you, make the love of him like the love of you, make his blade firm against his enemies." Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature I, pp. 37–38, Pyramid Texts, spells 220–221, Mercer's translation.

The cobra on the brow has a story, told in the Bremner-Rhind Papyrus. The "Lord of All" says he was alone in the first water; he brought forth Shu and Tefnut, who went far away, and his Eye followed them until they brought it back to him. When the Eye returned it found that he had put another eye in its place, and it raged at him. So he raised it to his brow, and when it ruled over the whole land its rage died down, because he had given back to it what had been taken from it. The commentator notes that this is the origin of the uraeus. The Global Egyptian Museum says the cobra on the brow of kings and gods is Wadjet, that in myth she is the Eye of Ra, the Eye of Horus and the crown of the north, and that many goddesses were linked with her, among them Hathor, Bastet, Sekhmet and Tefnut.

At Buto Herodotus heard another story. Buto had a temple of a goddess he calls "Leto", with an oracle people trusted, and near it a lake with an island called Khemmis, which the Egyptians say floats. They say that Leto lived at Buto and took the son of Isis, whom Herodotus calls Apollo and the Egyptians Horus, and hid him on this island when Seth came hunting through the world for the son of Osiris. So Wadjet, lady of Buto, is the nurse who hides the child king from his enemy. The Metropolitan Museum has a copper-alloy figure of the goddess Wadjet holding the child Horus.

The idea the Two Ladies turn on is that the king does not rule the land until its two guardians meet on his brow. The north has its cobra and the south its vulture, and each both guards and frightens: the Eye that raged when it was replaced, once placed on the brow, rules the land and guards its wearer, and the crown that is feared is the one the king asks to make him feared as she is.

We read the names in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes the first Wꜣḏ.t, "the green one", from wꜣḏ: papyrus, green, fresh. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from wadaja or wajada and explains it as the green serpent, which is the right meaning. Egyptologists match its letters with a known Semitic root for green: Peust sets wꜣḏ beside Semitic w-r-q, green and yellow in Akkadian and Hebrew, Arabic waraq, "leaves", and Berber awray, "green". In Lane, shajara wariqa is a tree with many leaves. So Wadjet is al-wariqa, the green, leafy one, and her image in the Delta is the green papyrus. Egyptian writes the second Nḫb.t, "she of Nekheb", after her city. Egyptian has a verb nḫb, to assign, to decide, from which comes nḫb.t, the king's titulary. Arabic has nakhaba and intakhaba, to choose, nukhba, the chosen, and nakhaba al-ṣayd, the hawk tore out the heart of the game. So Nekhbet, on a reading proposed on the method, is al-nukhba: the one who chooses the king and fixes his name, and the vulture that tears out.

Linguistic Root

Wadjet: al-wariqa

In its extended table the Egyptian essay derives "Wadjet" from wadaja or wajada, glosses it "the green serpent", and grades the reading "medium".

The meaning the essay gives is right: the Global Egyptian Museum says the name means "the green one". But wadaja and wajada turn the last Egyptian letter, ḏ, into two letters, d and j, and drop the Egyptian ꜣ. Wadaj in Lane is a vein in the neck from which blood is let, and wajada is to find; neither has anything of green.

The root that answers every letter is given by Peust, in his discussion of Egyptian palatals that arose from older velars: he sets wꜣḏ "green, yellow" beside Semitic w-r-q "green, yellow", Akkadian warqu, Arabic waraq "leaves", Hebrew yāraq "to be green, to be yellow", and beside Berber awray "green" at Siwa and Tuareg ta-rwaq "yellow colour", crediting Frank Kammerzell with distinguishing this change from others. The letters meet one by one: w is w; the Egyptian ꜣ was a liquid, used for Semitic r in Middle Kingdom names; and Egyptian ḏ is a palatal that came from q beside the w.

The Hebrew lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs gathers the family under ירק: greenness in Hebrew, "grow green" in Aramaic, "yellow, green" in Akkadian, waraq "leaf" and waraqa "put forth leaves" in Arabic, with wurqa "ash colour", wariq "silver coin", and gold in Sabaean and Ethiopic, all from the colour. Lane has shajar wāriq, shajara wāriqa, wariqa and warīqa: a tree with many leaves.

The reading we settle on: Wadjet is al-wariqa, the green, leafy one, in all three letters, and the essay's reading is right in its meaning. Hebrew and Akkadian kept the root's greenness, Arabic the green leaf itself, and Egyptian the green papyrus that is the image of the Delta. From the same Egyptian root comes "flourishing of years", which Queen Hatshepsut took as her Two Ladies name.

Nekhbet: al-nukhba

The Egyptian essay does not read Nekhbet's name. The Global Egyptian Museum says it means "she of Nekheb", a derivation from the city. The reading proposed on the method takes the city's letters, n, ḫ and b, which are exactly the letters of Arabic nakhaba.

From these letters Egyptian has the verb nḫb, to assign, to decide, and from it nḫb.t, the king's titulary and designation, written like the goddess's name itself. In Lane, nakhaba and intakhaba are to draw out, to take out; nakhaba al-ṣayd, the hawk tore out the heart of the game; nukhaba and nukhba, chosen, select, best, a company chosen and drawn out from the men, as in "we went out with the nukhaba". So the root in both tongues is choosing and appointing, and in Arabic it is also the act of the raptor that tears out. Nekhbet is a vulture who stands on the king's brow, one of the Two Ladies after whose image one of the king's names is written.

Peust notes that the city's name survives in Arabic: Nekheb became el-Kab, after its kh became k.

The limit of this reading is that the meaning of the city's name is unknown, so whether Nekheb came from the verb "to assign" or from something else cannot be said, and the reading remains a proposal.

Shifts used: w = w; Egyptian ꜣ = r; Egyptian ḏ = q before it became a palatal; n, ḫ and b unchanged; the feminine t in both names.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Two Ladies name in the king's titulary

The Egyptian king had five names, one of them the "Two Ladies name". The Bentresh Stela gives an example: "Two Ladies: Abiding in kingship like Atum"; Lichtheim notes that this and the other names with it were wrongly composed from the titulary of Thutmose IV. Queen Hatshepsut took the Two Ladies name "Flourishing of years". The Metropolitan Museum has a limestone plaque of the Late or Ptolemaic Period with Wadjet and Nekhbet, "the Two Ladies", and a falcon on the other face.

The one who rises

The cobra on the brow is called in Egyptian jꜥr.t, "she who rises", from jꜥr, to mount up, because the cobra lifts its head and spreads its hood when it strikes. The Greek name for it is uraeus.

Nekhbet at Nekheb, and the vulture at Thebes

The Global Egyptian Museum says that at el-Kab, beside a temple of Thoth, a sanctuary of Nekhbet has been found whose oldest parts go back to prehistory, and that the walled settlement of the Early Dynastic Period was one of Egypt's first cities. It says the vulture was the form of two goddesses: Nekhbet, and Mut, Amun's wife, of whose vulture origin only her vulture headdress and the sign used to write her name remain. The Greeks called Nekheb "the city of Eileithyia", their goddess of childbirth.

Symbolic Reading

The Egyptian rereading essay makes Egypt's myths images of its land and its Nile, and sees the animal images as tools by which the Egyptians explained their world. On that approach the Two Ladies are the images of the two lands: the green north, land of papyrus and marshes, whose image is a cobra living in the papyrus and bearing the name of greenness, and the narrow rocky south between two ranges of hills, whose image is a vulture circling over the valley.

The story of the Eye that raged and then grew calm on the brow is an image of power that is feared: it is not driven away but given a place above the head, where it becomes a guardian. So the two goddesses, the cobra that bites and the vulture that tears, become the guardians of the king who wears them.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Herodotus heard at Buto that Leto, the city's goddess, hid the son of Isis, Apollo to the Greeks and Horus to the Egyptians, on a floating island when Seth came looking for him. In the Greeks' own story Leto bears Apollo on the island of Delos after Hera has hunted her over the whole earth. In both, the mother or nurse shelters the child on an island from a pursuer who wants him.

The cobra on the brow is the raging Eye of Ra, and in another story the Eye's rage is Sekhmet, who nearly destroyed mankind, and in another Tefnut, who went off to Nubia in anger and came back. The king calls the crown "Great of magic", a title belonging to Heka.

Among the Greeks Hecate sits beside kings when they give judgment and grants victory in war, and comes by night as a goddess of magic with serpents coiled round her and torches about her, as the Two Ladies sit on the king's brow and are called "Great-in-magic", in Hecate.