Hathor goddess biography

Hathor was often depicted as a cow goddess, symbolizing her nurturing and protective nature. She was also associated with music, dance, and intoxication, and was believed to bring happiness and celebration to those who worshipped her. The myth of Hathor is a complex and multifaceted one, with various versions and interpretations found in different texts and sources.

One of the most well-known myths involving Hathor is the story of the Eye of Ra. In this myth, Hathor is said to have transformed into the fierce lioness goddess Sekhmet, who was sent by Ra to punish humanity for their disobedience. He did so by tricking her into consuming a large quantity of beer dyed red to resemble blood, causing her to become intoxicated and fall asleep.

When she awoke, she had transformed back into Hathor, the gentle and loving goddess. This myth highlights the duality and transformation of Hathor, who could be both nurturing and destructive, depending on the circumstances. Another important aspect of the myth of Hathor is her role as the mother of Horus, the falcon-headed god of kingship.

According to some versions of the myth, Hathor is said to have been impregnated by Ra in the form of a great bull, symbolizing his power and virility. The temple complex is one of the best preserved in Egypt and covers 40, square meters. A mud-brick wall surrounds the sacred space. The present buildings date to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods but fragments of older buildings exist on the site.

Some foundations date to the reign of King Khufu , the builder of the Great Pyramid. Egyptologists have cleaned the soot off of the ceiling of one of the main halls. This revealed some of the best preserved ancient paintings discovered to date. The temple precinct includes buildings other than the temple of Hathor. There were a series of chapels dedicated to other gods and goddesses, including one to Osiris.

Egyptologists found a sacred pool and a birth house in the temple. Just as she crossed the boundary between Egypt and foreign lands, Hathor passed through the boundary between the living and the Duat , the realm of the dead. Because the sky goddess—either Nut or Hathor—assisted Ra in his daily rebirth, she had an important part in ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs , according to which deceased humans were reborn like the sun god.

Nut, Hathor, and Imentet could each, in different texts, lead the deceased into a place where they would receive food and drink for eternal sustenance. Thus, Hathor, as Imentet, often appears on tombs, welcoming the deceased person as her child into a blissful afterlife. Nut most commonly filled this role, but the tree goddess was sometimes called Hathor instead.

The afterlife also had a sexual aspect. In the Osiris myth, the murdered god Osiris was resurrected when he copulated with Isis and conceived Horus. In solar ideology, Ra's union with the sky goddess allowed his own rebirth. Sex therefore enabled the rebirth of the deceased, and goddesses like Isis and Hathor served to rouse the deceased to new life.

But they merely stimulated the male deities' regenerative powers, rather than playing the central role. Ancient Egyptians prefixed the names of the deceased with Osiris's name to connect them with his resurrection. For example, a woman named Henutmehyt would be dubbed "Osiris-Henutmehyt". Over time they increasingly associated the deceased with both male and female divine powers.

In the Third Intermediate Period c. In some cases, women were called "Osiris-Hathor", indicating that they benefited from the revivifying power of both deities. In these late periods, Hathor was sometimes said to rule the afterlife as Osiris did. Hathor was often depicted as a cow bearing the sun disk between her horns, especially when shown nursing the king.

She could also appear as a woman with the head of a cow. Her most common form, however, was a woman wearing a headdress of the horns and sun disk, often with a red or turquoise sheath dress, or a dress combining both colors. Sometimes the horns stood atop a low modius or the vulture headdress that Egyptian queens often wore in the New Kingdom. Because Isis adopted the same headdress during the New Kingdom, the two goddesses can be distinguished only if labeled in writing.

When in the role of Imentet, Hathor wore the emblem of the west upon her head instead of the horned headdress. Some animals other than cattle could represent Hathor. The uraeus was a common motif in Egyptian art and could represent a variety of goddesses who were identified with the Eye of Ra. She also appeared as a lioness, and this form had a similar meaning.

Like other goddesses, Hathor might carry a stalk of papyrus as a staff, though she could instead hold a was staff, a symbol of power that was usually restricted to male deities. The sistrum came in two varieties: a simple loop shape or the more complex naos sistrum, which was shaped to resemble a naos shrine and flanked by volutes resembling the antennae of the Bat emblem.

Some mirror handles were made in the shape of Hathor's face. Hathor was sometimes represented as a human face with bovine ears, seen from the front rather than in the profile-based perspective that was typical of Egyptian art. When she appears in this form, the tresses on either side of her face often curl into loops. This mask-like face was placed on the capitals of columns beginning in the late Old Kingdom.

Columns of this style were used in many temples to Hathor and other goddesses. The designs of Hathoric columns have a complex relationship with those of sistra. Both styles of sistrum can bear the Hathor mask on the handle, and Hathoric columns often incorporate the naos sistrum shape above the goddess's head. During the Early Dynastic Period, Neith was the preeminent goddess at the royal court, [ ] while in the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor became the goddess most closely linked with the king.

Hathor was one of the few deities to receive such donations. She may have absorbed the traits of contemporary provincial goddesses. Many female royals, though not reigning queens, held positions in the cult during the Old Kingdom. The first images of the Hathor-cow suckling the king date to his reign, and several priestesses of Hathor were depicted as though they were his wives, although he may not have actually married them.

Queens were portrayed with the headdress of Hathor beginning in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. An image of the sed festival of Amenhotep III , meant to celebrate and renew his rule, shows the king together with Hathor and his queen Tiye , which could mean that the king symbolically married the goddess in the course of the festival. Hatshepsut , a woman who ruled as a pharaoh in the early New Kingdom, emphasized her relationship to Hathor in a different way.

The preeminence of Amun during the New Kingdom gave greater visibility to his consort Mut, and in the course of the period, Isis began appearing in roles that traditionally belonged to Hathor alone, such as that of the goddess in the solar barque. Despite the growing prominence of these deities, Hathor remained important, particularly in relation to fertility, sexuality, and queenship, throughout the New Kingdom.

After the New Kingdom, Isis increasingly overshadowed Hathor and other goddesses as she took on their characteristics. Beginning with Arsinoe II , wife of Ptolemy II , the Ptolemies closely linked their queens with Isis and with several Greek goddesses, particularly their own goddess of love and sexuality, Aphrodite. Thus, the poet Callimachus alluded to the myth of Hathor's lost lock of hair in the Aetia when praising Berenice II for sacrificing her own hair to Aphrodite, [ 46 ] and iconographic traits that Isis and Hathor shared, such as the bovine horns and vulture headdress, appeared on images portraying Ptolemaic queens as Aphrodite.

More temples were dedicated to Hathor than to any other Egyptian goddess. A willow and a sycamore tree stood near the sanctuary and may have been worshipped as manifestations of the goddess. The last version of the temple was built in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and is today one of the best-preserved Egyptian temples from that time. As the rulers of the Old Kingdom made an effort to develop towns in Upper and Middle Egypt , several cult centers of Hathor were founded across the region, at sites such as Cusae , Akhmim , and Naga ed-Der.

During the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, Mentuhotep II established a permanent cult center for her in the necropolis at Deir el-Bahari. One continued to function and was periodically rebuilt as late as the Ptolemaic Period, centuries after the village was abandoned. In the Old Kingdom, most priests of Hathor, including the highest ranks, were women.

Many of these women were members of the royal family. Thus, non-royal women disappeared from the high ranks of Hathor's priesthood, [ ] although women continued to serve as musicians and singers in temple cults across Egypt. The most frequent temple rite for any deity was the daily offering ritual, in which the cult image, or statue, of a deity would be clothed and given food.

Many of Hathor's annual festivals were celebrated with drinking and dancing that served a ritual purpose. Revelers at these festivals may have aimed to reach a state of religious ecstasy , which was otherwise rare or nonexistent in ancient Egyptian religion. Graves-Brown suggests that celebrants in Hathor's festivals aimed to reach an altered state of consciousness to allow them interact with the divine realm.

It was celebrated as early as the Middle Kingdom, but it is best known from Ptolemaic and Roman times. Whereas the rampages of the Eye of Ra brought death to humans, the Festival of Drunkenness celebrated life, abundance, and joy. In a local Theban festival known as the Beautiful Festival of the Valley , which began to be celebrated in the Middle Kingdom, the cult image of Amun from the Temple of Karnak visited the temples in the Theban Necropolis while members of the community went to the tombs of their deceased relatives to drink, eat, and celebrate.

Several temples in Ptolemaic times, including that of Dendera, observed the Egyptian new year with a series of ceremonies in which images of the temple deity were supposed to be revitalized by contact with the sun god. On the days leading up to the new year, Dendera's statue of Hathor was taken to the wabet , a specialized room in the temple, and placed under a ceiling decorated with images of the sky and sun.

On the first day of the new year, the first day of the month of Thoth , the Hathor image was carried up to the roof to be bathed in genuine sunlight. The best-documented festival focused on Hathor is another Ptolemaic celebration, the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion. It took place over fourteen days in the month of Epiphi. The endpoint of the journey was the Temple of Horus at Edfu , where the Hathor statue from Dendera met that of Horus of Edfu and the two were placed together.

The texts say the divine couple performed offering rites for these entombed gods. Bleeker thought the Beautiful Reunion was another celebration of the return of the Distant Goddess, citing allusions in the temple's festival texts to the myth of the solar eye. She points out that the birth of Horus and Hathor's son Ihy was celebrated at Dendera nine months after the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, implying that Hathor's visit to Horus represented Ihy's conception.

The third month of the Egyptian calendar , Hathor or Athyr , was named for the goddess. Festivities in her honor took place throughout the month, although they are not recorded in the texts from Dendera. Egyptian kings as early as the Old Kingdom donated goods to the temple of Baalat Gebal in Byblos, using the syncretism of Baalat with Hathor to cement their close trading relationship with Byblos.

A few artifacts from the early first millennium BC suggest that the Egyptians began equating Baalat with Isis at that time. Its presence in the tomb suggests the Mycenaeans may have known that the Egyptians connected Hathor with the afterlife. Egyptians in the Sinai Peninsula built a few temples in the region. The largest was a complex dedicated primarily to Hathor as patroness of mining at Serabit el-Khadim , on the west side of the peninsula.

It included a shrine to Hathor that was probably deserted during the off-season. The local Midianites , whom the Egyptians used as part of the mining workforce, may have given offerings to Hathor as their overseers did. After the Egyptians abandoned the site in the Twentieth Dynasty , however, the Midianites converted the shrine to a tent shrine devoted to their own deities.

In contrast, the Nubians in the south fully incorporated Hathor into their religion. During the New Kingdom, when most of Nubia was under Egyptian control, pharaohs dedicated several temples in Nubia to Hathor, such as those at Faras and Mirgissa. Therefore, Hathor, Isis, Mut, and Nut were all seen as the mythological mother of each Kushite king and equated with his female relatives, such as the kandake , the Kushite queen or queen mother , who had prominent roles in Kushite religion.

Thus, in the Meroitic period of Nubian history c. In addition to formal and public rituals at temples, Egyptians privately worshipped deities for personal reasons, including at their homes. Birth was hazardous for both mother and child in ancient Egypt, yet children were much desired. Thus fertility and safe childbirth are among the most prominent concerns in popular religion, and fertility deities such as Hathor and Taweret were commonly worshipped in household shrines.

Egyptian women squatted on bricks while giving birth, and the only known surviving birth brick from ancient Egypt is decorated with an image of a woman holding her child flanked by images of Hathor. Hathor was one of a handful of deities, including Amun, Ptah, and Thoth, who were commonly prayed to for help with personal problems. Most offerings to Hathor were used for their symbolism, not for their intrinsic value.

Cloths painted with images of Hathor were common, as were plaques and figurines depicting her animal forms. Different types of offerings may have symbolized different goals on the part of the donor, but their meaning is usually unknown. Images of Hathor alluded to her mythical roles, like depictions of the maternal cow in the marsh. Some Egyptians also left written prayers to Hathor, inscribed on stelae or written as graffiti.

With origins dating back nearly years, cow-headed Hathor was one of the oldest goddesses in the Egyptian pantheon. Though Hathor was the goddess of love, motherhood, birth, joy, and music, she fulfilled other roles as well.

Hathor goddess biography

In her earliest days, she rampaged throughout the land destroying anyone who dared to mock her father. Her various facets demonstrated both the consistency and the mutability of Egyptian cosmology. Lady of the Holy Country [4]. Lady of the Southern Sycamore [5]. Hathor Mistress of Heaven [6]. While Hathor was most easily recognized as a cow-headed woman, she had a number of other representations including a cow, a woman with cow ears, and a woman with cow horns and a solar disk.

The last of these was difficult to differentiate from Isis, who was sometimes portrayed in the same manner. This carving of Hathor at Philae Temple Complex constructed c. More than a mere solar disk, the Eye of Ra was considered to be a manifestation of Hathor, though Bastet and Mut shared this distinction. This was because Mesketiu resembled the hind leg of an ox.

In addition to love, Hathor was the goddess of pleasure and music. One confusing element of Egyptian mythology was that gods and goddesses could become one another by acting like one another. In other words, when Hathor expressed elements of Sekhmet i. The reverse could also apply: by placating Sekhmet, worshippers hoped to convert her into a more benign goddess like Hathor or Bastet.

Egyptian religion was heterogeneous, with four main cults dominating the theocratic spectrum: the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, the Theban triad, the Memphite triad, and the Ennead of Heliopolis. Throughout the various cults and ages, she was described as:. The daughter of Ra and Nut [17]. The mother of Ra-Horakhty [18]. The mother of Horus the Elder [19].