Two notes from "Wit and Humour in Ancient Egypt"

[ikhet_sekhmet]

Here's that cat / lioness dichotomy again, in a pair of proverbs from The Teaching of Ankhsheshonq:

"When a man smells of myrrh his wife is a cat before him."
"When a man is suffering his wife is a lioness before him."

I need to do some reading on Hathor this year, because of her close association with Sekhmet in the Destruction of Mankind, and also because she's associated with Tefnut in the Myth of the Eye of the Sun - there's that slippery interchangability between Egyptian deities, so several of them are "the Eye of Ra". (Hathor also flashes Ra in The Contendings of Horus and Seth and makes him laugh! Spot the parallel with Baubo in the story of Demeter's search for Persephone.)
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Houlihan, Patrick F. Wit and Humour in Ancient Egypt. Rubicon, London, 2001.