Plaything of Sekhmet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ikhet_sekhmet) wrote2013-12-18 09:54 pm
ikhet_sekhmet) wrote2013-12-18 09:54 pm
Entry tags:
Gods are like chips
In his much-imitated 1922 essay "Memorial Service", H.L. Mencken gives a lengthy list of "dead gods" whose worship has long been abandoned. Though Mencken's basic point is valid, his actual list is full of inaccuracies (as is his characterisation of ancient thought and worship). For example, he lists both Marduk and one of Marduk's epithets, U-dimmer-an-kia, "Lord of Heaven and Earth" as separate gods - even though the difference is made clear in his probable source, the Religion of Assyria and Babylonia.
Sometimes, paging through accounts of Phoenician and Palmyran or Egyptian gods, I feel the way Mencken must have as he ran an eye over the trilingual list in Pinches' book - overwhelmed! For example: a chapter on "Snwy, father of Sobek", which mentions not just those two crocodile gods (and alternative names for Snwy, p3-Snwy and Psosnaus, as well as Snwy-Ra) but also Sokanobkoneus, Soknobrasis, Pnepheros, Petesuchos, Soknebtynis, Soknopaios, and Sokonpieios. (To paraphrase Mencken: you may think that I invent the names. I do not.) Also mentioned are the gods Heron, Isis-Nepheros, and the serpent-goddess of Narmouthis, alongside more familiar deities like Amun and Bastet. Blimey! It wouldn't take long to whip up a list of gods ten times as long as Mencken's, or even the longer lists put about on the net by atheists.
The chapter gives a table of localities and which gods were worshipped where - IIUC some of these are local variants of Sobek. Interestingly, the Book of the Faiyum has a section where the local god of every nome in Egypt was represented in crocodile form. If your god's a croc, apparently, all gods are crocs - or at least, the animal becomes shorthand for "god", wherever they are.
(Poking around in non-English language Wikipedias turned up even more Egyptian gods I hadn't previously encountered, such as Âbâset, the lioness goddess Âperet-Isis, the Meroitic Sbomeker. And then there's Kebechet and Horhekenu and the four Asebet goddesses, and Ninsi'anna, an aspect of Inanna/Ishtar... If I was trying to be a completionist I would be in desperate trouble.)
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El-Weshahy, Mofida. "'Swny', the father of Sobek". in Basem El-Sharkaway (ed). The Horizon: Studies in Egyptology in Honour of M. A. Nur El-Din. The American University in Cairo Press, 2010.
Sometimes, paging through accounts of Phoenician and Palmyran or Egyptian gods, I feel the way Mencken must have as he ran an eye over the trilingual list in Pinches' book - overwhelmed! For example: a chapter on "Snwy, father of Sobek", which mentions not just those two crocodile gods (and alternative names for Snwy, p3-Snwy and Psosnaus, as well as Snwy-Ra) but also Sokanobkoneus, Soknobrasis, Pnepheros, Petesuchos, Soknebtynis, Soknopaios, and Sokonpieios. (To paraphrase Mencken: you may think that I invent the names. I do not.) Also mentioned are the gods Heron, Isis-Nepheros, and the serpent-goddess of Narmouthis, alongside more familiar deities like Amun and Bastet. Blimey! It wouldn't take long to whip up a list of gods ten times as long as Mencken's, or even the longer lists put about on the net by atheists.
The chapter gives a table of localities and which gods were worshipped where - IIUC some of these are local variants of Sobek. Interestingly, the Book of the Faiyum has a section where the local god of every nome in Egypt was represented in crocodile form. If your god's a croc, apparently, all gods are crocs - or at least, the animal becomes shorthand for "god", wherever they are.
(Poking around in non-English language Wikipedias turned up even more Egyptian gods I hadn't previously encountered, such as Âbâset, the lioness goddess Âperet-Isis, the Meroitic Sbomeker. And then there's Kebechet and Horhekenu and the four Asebet goddesses, and Ninsi'anna, an aspect of Inanna/Ishtar... If I was trying to be a completionist I would be in desperate trouble.)
__
El-Weshahy, Mofida. "'Swny', the father of Sobek". in Basem El-Sharkaway (ed). The Horizon: Studies in Egyptology in Honour of M. A. Nur El-Din. The American University in Cairo Press, 2010.
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The Ptolemaic thing where they were deliberately obscure to stick it to the foreigners was, apparently, an endless source of hilarity. (I've been looking through the extended Gardiner list of signs, thanks to the Aegyptus font. Man there are some trainwrecks in there.)
I've added a note that Aperet-Isis = Repyt to my roll-call (http://ikhet-sekhmet.livejournal.com/64012.html) of lioness goddesses. *tips hat*