Goddess Hathor

Hathor (Ancient Egyptian: ḥwt-ḥr, lit. ’House of Horus’, Ancient Greek: Ἁθώρ Hathōr, Coptic: ϩⲁⲑⲱⲣ, Meroitic: 𐦠𐦴𐦫𐦢‎ Atari) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, both of whom were connected with kingship, and thus, she was the symbolic mother of their earthly representatives, the pharaohs. She was one of several goddesses who acted as the Eye of Ra, Ra’s feminine counterpart, and in this form, she had a vengeful aspect that protected him from his enemies. Her beneficent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and the mother of their sons. These two aspects of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls transition to the afterlife.

Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspect, although her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk. She could also be represented as a lioness, a cobra, or a sycamore tree.

Cattle goddesses similar to Hathor were portrayed in Egyptian art in the fourth millennium BC, but she may not have appeared until the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC). With the patronage of Old Kingdom rulers, she became one of Egypt’s most important deities. More temples were dedicated to her than any other goddess; her most prominent temple was Dendera in Upper Egypt. She was also worshipped in the temples of her male consorts. The Egyptians connected her with foreign lands, such as Nubia and Canaan, and their valuable goods, such as incense and semiprecious stones, and some of the peoples in those lands adopted her worship. In Egypt, she was one of the deities commonly invoked in private prayers and votive offerings, particularly by women desiring children.

During the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC), goddesses such as Mut and Isis encroached on Hathor’s position in royal ideology, but she remained one of the most widely worshipped deities. After the end of the New Kingdom, Hathor was increasingly overshadowed by Isis. Still, she continued to be venerated until the extinction of ancient Egyptian religion in the early centuries AD.

Origins

Images of cattle frequently appear in the artwork of Predynastic Egypt (before c. 3100 BC), as do images of women with upraised, curved arms reminiscent of the shape of bovine horns. Both types of imagery may represent goddesses connected with cattle. Cows are revered in many cultures, including ancient Egypt, as symbols of motherhood and nourishment because they care for their calves and provide humans with milk. The Gerzeh Palette, a stone palette from the Naqada II period of prehistory (c. 3500–3200 BC), shows the silhouette of a cow’s head with inward-curving horns surrounded by stars. The palette suggests that this cow was also linked with the sky, as were several goddesses from later times who were represented in this form: Hathor, Mehet-Weret, and Nut.

Despite these early precedents, Hathor is not unambiguously mentioned or depicted until the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2613–2494 BC) of the Old Kingdom, although several artefacts that refer to her may date to the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100–2686 BC). When Hathor does appear, her horns curve outward rather than inward, like those in Predynastic art.

A bovine deity with inward-curving horns appears on the Narmer Palette from near the start of Egyptian history, both atop the palette and on the belt or apron of the king, Narmer. The Egyptologist Henry George Fischer suggested this deity maybe Bat, a goddess who was later depicted with a woman’s face and inward-curling horns, seemingly reflecting the curve of the cow horns. The Egyptologist Lana Troy, however, identifies a passage in the Pyramid Texts from the late Old Kingdom that connects Hathor with the “apron” of the king, reminiscent of the goddess on Narmer’s garments and suggests the goddess on the Narmer Palette is Hathor rather than Bat.

In the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor rose rapidly to prominence. She supplanted an early crocodile god who was worshipped at Dendera in Upper Egypt to become Dendera’s patron deity, and she increasingly absorbed the cult of Bat in the neighbouring region of Hu so that in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC), the two deities fused into one. Unlike earlier times, the theology surrounding the pharaoh in the Old Kingdom focused heavily on the sun god Ra as king of the gods and father and patron of the earthly king. Hathor ascended with Ra and became his mythological wife and, thus, the divine mother of the pharaoh.

Roles

Hathor took many forms and appeared in a wide variety of roles. The Egyptologist Robyn Gillam suggests that these diverse forms emerged when the royal goddess promoted by the Old Kingdom court subsumed many local goddesses worshipped by the general populace, who were then treated as manifestations of her. Egyptian texts often speak of the manifestations of the goddess as “Seven Hathors” or, less commonly, of many more Hathors—as many as 362. Gillam calls her “a type of deity rather than a single entity” for these reasons. Hathor’s diversity reflects the range of traits that the Egyptians associated with goddesses. More than any other deity, she exemplifies the Egyptian perception of femininity.

Sky goddess

Hathor was given the epithets “mistress of the sky” and “mistress of the stars” and was said to dwell in the sky with Ra and other sun deities. Egyptians thought of the sky as a body of water through which the sun god sailed, and they connected it with the waters from which, according to their creation myths, the sun emerged at the beginning of time. This cosmic mother goddess was often represented as a cow. Hathor and Mehet-Weret were considered the cow who birthed the sun god and placed him between her horns. Like Nut, Hathor was said to give birth to the sun god each dawn.

Hathor’s Egyptian name was ḥwt-ḥrw or ḥwt-ḥr. It is typically translated as “house of Horus” but can also be rendered as “my house is the sky”. The falcon god Horus represented, among other things, the sun and sky. The “house” may be the sky in which Horus lives or the goddess’s womb from which he is born each day as a sun god.

Solar goddess

Hathor was a solar deity, a feminine counterpart to sun gods such as Horus and Ra, and was a member of the divine entourage that accompanied Ra as he sailed through the sky in his barque. She was commonly called the “Golden One”, referring to the sun’s radiance, and texts from her temple at Dendera say, “Her rays illuminate the whole earth.” She was sometimes fused with another goddess, Nebethetepet, whose name can mean “Lady of the Offering”, “Lady of Contentment”, or “Lady of the Vulva”. At Ra’s cult centre of Heliopolis, Hathor-Nebethetepet was worshipped as his consort, and the Egyptologist Rudolf Anthes argued that Hathor’s name referred to a mythical “house of Horus” at Heliopolis that was connected with the ideology of kingship.

She was one of many goddesses to take the role of the Eye of Ra, a feminine personification of the disk of the sun and an extension of Ra’s power. Ra was sometimes portrayed inside the disk, which Troy interprets as meaning that the eye goddess was thought of as a womb from which the sun god was born. Hathor’s seemingly contradictory roles as mother, wife, and daughter of Ra reflected the daily cycle of the sun. At sunset, the god entered the body of the sky goddess, impregnating her and fathering the deities born from her womb at sunrise: himself and the eye goddess, who would later give birth to him. Ra gave rise to his daughter, the eye goddess, who gave rise to him, her son, in a cycle of constant regeneration.

The Eye of Ra protected the sun god from his enemies and was often represented as a uraeus, rearing cobra, or lioness. A form of the Eye of Ra known as “Hathor of the Four Faces”, represented by a set of four cobras, was said to face each cardinal direction to watch for threats to the sun god. A group of myths, known from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) onward, describe what happens when the Eye goddess rampages uncontrolled. In the funerary text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra sends Hathor as the Eye of Ra to punish humans for plotting rebellion against his rule.

She becomes the lioness goddess Sekhmet and massacres the rebellious humans, but Ra decides to prevent her from killing all humanity. He orders that beer be dyed red and poured out over the land. The Eye goddess drinks the beer, mistaking it for blood, and reverts to being the benign and beautiful Hathor in her inebriated state. This story relates to the myth of the Distant Goddess from the Late and Ptolemaic periods. The Eye goddess, sometimes as Hathor, rebels against Ra’s control and rampages freely in a foreign land: Libya, west of Egypt or Nubia to the south. Weakened by losing his Eye, Ra sends another god, such as Thoth, to bring her back to him. Once pacified, the goddess returns to become the consort of the sun god or of the god who brings her back. The two aspects of the Eye goddess—violent and dangerous versus beautiful and joyful—reflected the Egyptian belief that women, as the Egyptologist Carolyn Graves-Brown puts it, “encompassed both extreme passions of fury and love”.

Music, dance, and joy

Egyptian religion celebrated the sensory pleasures of life, believed to be among the gods’ gifts to humanity. Egyptians ate, drank, danced, and played music at religious festivals. They perfumed the air with flowers and incense. Many of Hathor’s epithets link her to celebration; she is called the mistress of music, dance, garlands, myrrh, and drunkenness. Musicians play tambourines, harps, lyres, and sistra in Hathor’s honour in hymns and temple reliefs. The sistrum, a rattle-like instrument, was particularly important in Hathor’s worship. Sistra had erotic connotations and, by extension, alluded to the creation of new life.

These aspects of Hathor were linked with the myth of the Eye of Ra. The Eye was pacified by beer in the story of the Destruction of humanity. In some versions of the Distant Goddess myth, the wandering Eye’s wildness abated when she was appeased with products of civilization like music, dance, and wine. The water of the annual flooding of the Nile, coloured red by sediment, was likened to wine and the red-dyed beer in The Destruction of human beings. Festivals during the inundation incorporated drink, music, and dance to appease the returning goddess. A text from the Temple of Edfu says of Hathor, “The gods play the sistrum for her, the goddesses dance for her to dispel her bad temper.” A hymn to the goddess Raet-Tawy as a form of Hathor at the temple of Medamud describes the Festival of Drunkenness (Tekh Festival) as part of her mythic return to Egypt. Women carry bouquets, drunken revellers play the drums, and people and animals from foreign lands dance for her as she enters the temple’s festival booth. The noise of the celebration drives away hostile powers and ensures the goddess will remain joyful as she awaits the male god of the temple, her mythological consort Montu, whose son she will bear.

Sexuality, beauty, and love

Hathor’s joyful, ecstatic side indicates her feminine, procreative power. In some creation myths, she helped produce the world itself. Atum, a creator god who contained all things within himself, was said to have made his children Shu and Tefnut and thus begun the process of creation by masturbating. The hand he used for this act, the Hand of Atum, represented the female aspect of himself and could be personified by Hathor, Nebethetepet, or another goddess, Iusaaset. In a late creation myth from the Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BC), the god Khonsu is put in a central role, and Hathor is the goddess with whom Khonsu mates to enable creation.

Hathor could be the consort of many male gods, of whom Ra was only the most prominent. Mut was the usual consort of Amun, the preeminent deity during the New Kingdom who was often linked with Ra. But Mut was rarely portrayed alongside Amun in contexts related to sex or fertility, and in those circumstances, Hathor or Isis stood at his side instead. In the late periods of Egyptian history, the form of Hathor from Dendera and the form of Horus from Edfu were considered husband and wife. In different versions of the myth of the Distant Goddess, Hathor-Raettawy was the consort of Montu, and Hathor-Tefnut was the consort of Shu.

Hathor’s sexual side was seen in some short stories. In a cryptic fragment of a Middle Kingdom story, “The Tale of the Herdsman, ” a herdsman encounters a hairy, animal-like goddess in a marsh and reacts with terror. On another day, he encounters her as a nude, alluring woman. Most Egyptologists who study this story think this woman is Hathor or a goddess like her, who can be wild, dangerous, benign, and erotic. Thomas Schneider interprets the text as implying that between his two encounters with the goddess, the herdsman has done something to soothe her. In “The Contendings of Horus and Set”, a New Kingdom short story about the dispute between those two gods, Ra is upset after being insulted by another god, Babi, and lies on his back alone. After some time, Hathor exposes her genitals to Ra, making him laugh and get up again to perform his duties as ruler of the gods. Life and order were thought to be dependent on Ra’s activity, and the story implies that Hathor averted the disastrous consequences of his idleness. Her act may have lifted Ra’s spirits partly because it sexually aroused him, although why he laughed is not fully understood.

Hathor was praised for her beautiful hair. Egyptian literature contains allusions to a myth not clearly described in any surviving texts, in which Hathor lost a lock of hair that represented her sexual allure. One text compares this loss with Horus’s loss of his divine Eye and Set’s loss of his testicles during the struggle between the two gods, implying that Hathor’s lock was as catastrophic for her as the maiming of Horus and Set was for them.

Hathor was called “mistress of love” as an extension of her sexual aspect. In the series of love poems from Papyrus Chester Beatty I, from the Twentieth Dynasty (c. 1189–1077 BC), men and women ask Hathor to bring their lovers to them: “I prayed to her [Hathor], and she heard my prayer. She destined my mistress [loved one] for me. And she came of her own free will to see me.

Motherhood and queenship

Hathor was considered the mother of various child deities. As her name suggests, she was often considered Horus’s mother and consort. As both the king’s wife and his heir’s mother, Hathor was the divine counterpart of human queens.

Isis and Osiris were considered Horus’s parents in the Osiris myth as far back as the late Old Kingdom, but the relationship between Horus and Hathor may be older still. If so, Horus only came to be linked with Isis and Osiris as the Osiris myth emerged during the Old Kingdom. Even after Isis was firmly established as Horus’s mother, Hathor continued to appear in this role, especially when nursing the pharaoh. Images of the Hathor cow with a child in a papyrus thicket represented his mythological upbringing in a secluded marsh. Goddesses’ milk was a sign of divinity and royal status. Thus, images in which Hathor nurses the pharaoh represent his right to rule. Hathor’s relationship with Horus gave a healing aspect to her character, as she was said to have restored Horus’s missing Eye or eyes after Set attacked him. In the version of this episode in “The Contendings of Horus and Set”, Hathor finds Horus with his eyes torn out and heals the wounds with gazelle’s milk.

Beginning in the Late Period (664–323 BC), temples focused on the worship of a divine family: an adult male deity, his wife, and their immature son. Satellite buildings, known as mammisis, were built to celebrate the birth of the local child deity. The child god represented the cyclical renewal of the cosmos and was an archetypal heir to the kingship. Hathor was the mother in many of these local divine triads. At Dendera, the mature Horus of Edfu was the father, and Hathor was the mother. At the same time, their child was Ihy, a god whose name meant “sistrum-player” and who personified the jubilation associated with the instrument. At Kom Ombo, Hathor’s local form, Tasenetnofret, was the mother to Horus’s son Panebtawy. Other children of Hathor included a minor deity from the town of Hu named Neferhotep and several child forms of Horus.

The milky sap of the sycamore tree, which the Egyptians regarded as a symbol of life, became one of her symbols. The milk was equated with water of the Nile inundation and thus fertility. In the late Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, many temples contained a creation myth that adapted long-standing ideas about creation. The version from Hathor’s temple at Dendera emphasizes that as a female solar deity, she was the first being to emerge from the primordial waters that preceded creation, and her life-giving light and milk nourished all living things.

Hathor’s maternal aspects can be compared with those of Isis and Mut, yet there are many contrasts between them. Isis’s devotion to her husband and care for their child represented a more socially acceptable form of love than Hathor’s uninhibited sexuality, and Mut’s character was more authoritative than sexual. In the 1st century CE text, Insinger Papyrus likens a faithful wife, the mistress of a household, to Mut while comparing Hathor to a strange woman who tempts a married man.

Fate

Like Meskhenet, another goddess who presided over birth, Hathor was connected with Shai, the Egyptian concept of fate, mainly when she took the form of the Seven Hathors. In two New Kingdom works of fiction, the “Tale of Two Brothers” and the “Tale of the Doomed Prince”, the Hathors appear at the births of significant characters and foretell the manner of their deaths. The Egyptians tended to think of fate as inevitable. Yet in “The Tale of the Doomed Prince”, the prince who is its protagonist can escape one of the possible violent deaths that the Seven Hathors have foretold for him. While the end of the story is missing, the surviving portions imply that the prince can escape his fate with the help of the gods.

Foreign lands and goods

Hathor was connected with trade and foreign lands, possibly because her role as a sky goddess linked her with stars and navigation. She was also believed to protect ships on the Nile and in the seas beyond Egypt as she protected the barque of Ra in the sky. The mythological wandering of the Eye goddess in Nubia or Libya also connected her with those lands.

Egypt maintained trade relations with the coastal cities of Syria and Canaan, particularly Byblos, placing Egyptian religion in contact with the religions of that region. At some point, perhaps as early as the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians began to refer to the patron goddess of Byblos, Baalat Gebal, as a local form of Hathor. So strong was Hathor’s link to Byblos that texts from Dendera say she resided there. The Egyptians sometimes equated Anat, an aggressive Canaanite goddess who came to be worshipped in Egypt during the New Kingdom, with Hathor. Some Canaanites’ artworks depict a nude goddess with a curling wig taken from Hathor’s iconography. The goddess these images represent is unknown, but the Egyptians adopted her iconography and regarded her as an independent deity, Qetesh, whom they associated with Hathor.

Hathor was closely connected with the Sinai Peninsula, which was not considered part of Egypt proper but was the site of Egyptian mines for copper, turquoise, and malachite during the Middle and New Kingdoms. One of Hathor’s epithets, “Lady of Mefkat”, may have explicitly referred to turquoise or all blue-green minerals. She was also called “Lady of Faience”, a blue-green ceramic Egyptians likened to turquoise. Hathor was also worshipped at various quarries and mining sites in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, such as the amethyst mines of Wadi el-Hudi, where she was sometimes called “Lady of Amethyst”.

South of Egypt, Hathor’s influence was thought to have extended over the land of Punt, which lay along the Red Sea coast and was a significant source of the incense with which Hathor was linked, as well as with Nubia, northwest of Punt. The autobiography of Harkhuf, an official in the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2345–2181 BC), describes his expedition to land in or near Nubia, from which he brought back significant quantities of ebony, panther skins, and incense for the king. The text describes these foreign goods as Hathor’s gift to the pharaoh. Egyptian expeditions to mine gold in Nubia introduced her cult to the region during the Middle and New Kingdoms. New Kingdom pharaohs built several temples to her in the portions of Nubia that they ruled.

Hathor’s divine position in ancient Egyptian religion

The Ancient Egyptians depicted Hathor in their temples during the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2613–2494 BC) of the Old Kingdom. At that time, she became one of Egypt’s most essential deities.

During the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC), other goddesses such as Mut and Isis absorbed Hathor’s characteristics and, thus, affected her position in royal ideology. Despite this fact, she remained one of the most widely worshipped deities.

After the end of the New Kingdom, the goddess Isis became more famous among the Ancient Egyptians. Moreover, this goddess increasingly overshadowed the goddess Hathor. Once again, the Ancient Egyptians continued to revere and worship Hathor during the Greco-Roman Period. The most obvious example of the continuity of her cult is this impressive temple in Dendera.

Hathor’s dedicated Temples

• The temple of goddess Hathor in Dendera.

Temple of Hathor in Dendera

Just as visitors enter the Dendera temple complex, they notice you are looking at the impressive Temple of goddess Hathor. It is the dominant building in this complex and one of Egypt’s best-preserved temples.

History of the Temple of Hathor

The temple is a wondrous marvel to explore! The Ptolemies modified it on the same site in the Middle Kingdom, and this process continued until the time of the Roman emperor Trajan.

Ptolemies essentially contracted the existing Temple of Hathor during the Late Ptolemaic period. Specifically, Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra VII widely contributed to the construction during their reign. Later, the Romans made more additions to this building. Although the Ptolemies built this temple, its design follows the pattern of other classical Egyptian temples. So far, the only exception is the front design of the hypostyle. According to an inscription above the entrance of this front, Emperor Tiberius constructed it during his reign.