Anat the ubergoddess

[ikhet_sekhmet]

I'm spending a great deal of time over on Tumblr, where I'm dwellerinthelibrary, trying to correctly identify photos - mostly Egyptian stuff - found round the Web. This shift to a visual emphasis has reduced my efforts to fill this blog with random facts. :)

But here's a great snippet from Traversing Eternity (p 413), a collection of translated funerary texts from Graeco-Roman Egypt - specifically, from the Book of Traversing Eternity from which the collection takes its name, a long catalogue of events the deceased will witness or participate in:

"You will behold the weary ones, the four united together in their manifestation as a young bull. You will see their cows merged together in their form of Anat."

The glossary explains that the "cows" here are the four female members of the Ogdoad, the eight primeval deities of Hermopolis. I was struck by their identification with an imported goddess, one who doesn't seem to have been very significant to the Egyptians. (OTOH the image of Anat as a cow is more familiar.) It seems like a steep promotion to some sort of primeval creatrix. But who is the young bull?

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Mark Smith. Traversing Eternity: texts for the afterlife from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Comments

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

The four male members of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad were supposed to be united together in the form of a black bull, and the four female members into a black cow, and then these in turn apparently become a single entity in some fashion. We get this in the demotic cosmogony from P. Berlin 13603, and it's also alluded to in the fragmentary demotic cosmogony published recently as "On the Primaeval Ocean". Montu was sometimes regarded as being identical to the bull that unites the four male members of the Ogdoad. (I really ought to add this material to my entry on the Ogdoad, right now it's just mentioned in Montu's entry.) In any event, I'm unaware of any other text that specifies the identity of the cow in whom the four female members of the Ogdoad unite, so that makes this text rather special.

[ikhet-sekhmet.livejournal.com]

On the Primaeval Ocean is not yet available in my vicinity, but the chunk of it available through Google Books is full of interest. :)