Solar
Hathor
ḥwt-ḥrHow it changed
Held together roles that would be separate gods elsewhere: joy and music on one side, and on the other the Eye of Ra, who in the Book of the Heavenly Cow nearly annihilates humanity and is stopped only by being tricked into drinking beer dyed red. The two faces are the same goddess.
Cult centre
Dendera
Best attested
Old Kingdom onward
Family
Daughter of Ra; variously wife or mother of Horus, whose name she carries.
Epithets
- “Lady of the sycamore”
- “Mistress of turquoise”
How to recognise the figure
A cow, a woman with cow's horns and a sun disc, or a woman with cow's ears.
Appears in
c. 1160 BCE, Twentieth Dynasty
The Contendings of Horus and Set
Eighty years of divine litigation, with bribery, shapeshifting and open comedy at the gods' expense.
c. 1300 BCE, though the text claims to be older
The Destruction of Mankind
Ra sends a goddess to punish humanity, then has to get her drunk to stop her finishing the job.
Alluded to from the New Kingdom; a long demotic version survives from the Roman period
The distant goddess
The Eye of Ra storms off to Nubia in a rage, and the world dries up until she can be talked into coming home.
c. 1200 BCE, Nineteenth Dynasty
The Tale of Two Brothers
A folk tale, not a myth, and the oldest surviving story of a wife falsely accusing a man who refused her.
Ptolemaic, on the walls of the temple of Edfu
Horus of Edfu and the winged disc
A campaign narrative, carved on a temple wall, in which the sun god's son puts down a rebellion province by province.
Carries
Worshipped at
Others in this group