Property of Sekhmet

My interest has been captivated by this particular manifestation of the goddess! Quoth Miroslav Verner:

"The renewed mortuary cults at the Abusir pyramids survived, however, for only a short period and then died out forever. Abusir fell into complete oblivion for almost half a millennium. People returned there only at the beginning of the New Kingdom when the cult of the goddess Sakhmet developed in the ruins of [the Fifth Dynasty king] Sahure's mortuary temple [possibly because of] the relief of the lion goddess which once adorned the wall of the corridor around the temple's open court, and the precise significance of which was not grasped by simple people. The cult of the so-called 'Sahure Sakhmet' rapidly acquired an importance which transcended the level of popular culture. It endured until the end of the New Kingdom."

"Sakhmet-of-Sahure is mentioned in graffiti, and in a cartouche of Thutmose IV, which (says John Baines) means the cult probably started somewhere between his reign and the reign of Thutmose III. Betsy Bryan states that Thutmose IV "usurped" the relief and "reused" it for Sekhmet's cult, adding his cartouches to an existing relief of Sahure offering to Bastet, probably "to stress his link with the northern gods in whose territory he may have been a relative unknown". (But now I'm not sure if this was a different relief to the one Verner suggests inspired the cult, or the same one!)

ETA: Here, hang on a minute! Three years ago I blogged: "The earliest known scene of a wine offering is from the king Sahure's Pyramid temple. He's shown offering wine to Sekhmet, with an inscription that reads in part, 'Wine and libation for the ka of the Mistress of the Two Lands, Sekhmet of Sahure'." Far out, how many reliefs are we talking about - one, two, three? ETA ETA: At least two, according to Amr Aly Aly Gaber, who reports that two festivals of the goddess were celebrated in Deir el Medina, and suggests that Sekhmet-of-Sahure might have been a deified version of Sahure himself.

ETA from Paul Ghalioungli: "Her [Sekhmet's] figure, engraved on the walls of Sahoure's Temple at Abousir (Vth dynasty) acquired fame for the miracles it wrought, and special chapels attended by her own special clergy were consecrated to her in the temples of Egypt, where she became the object of universal worship."

ETA from Květa Smoláriková: "The peak of this cult, which dates mainly to the end of the 18th Dynasty, survived with a limited intensity through the two subsequent dynasties, as the construction and restoration inscriptions indicate. Numerous stelae and graffiti prove that Sekhmet of Sahure was held in high esteem by all classes of population, including foreigners. With no continuous support from the rulers, the cult of Sekhmet declined to the level of a purely local sanctuary, which it held during the whole Late Period, and perhaps even to the end of the Ptolemaic Period."

ETA from Françoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche: "Moreover, Egyptians generally had a certain prediection for places that were already 'old' in their eyes, charged with historical prestige or with a mythological aura..." They cite the cult of Sekhmet in Sahure's chapel as an example. "The old building was transformed into a veritable chapel that grew in size over the centuries and was administered by a clergy."

ETA from Alexander J. Peden: "The Vth Dynasty mortuary temple of King Sahure at Abû Sîr is the site of one of the latest visitors' graffiti known from Pharaonic Egypt. This late hieratic graffito, penned in black ink, is dated to Year 5 of Amasis and records the presence of one Khaemwase son of Pami, a prophet of Sekhmet-of-Sahure. This cult, established during the mid XVIIIth Dynasty, seems to have been based in the south part of the Sahure temple. Our partially preserved late hieratic text is the final dated evidence for this devotion and for visitors of any kinds to the temple until the Graeco-Roman era."

Intriguingly, there is apparently part of an Eighteenth Dynasty stela showing Sekhmet-of-Sahure at the National Museum in Warsaw (Inv. 199303).

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Baines, John. The destruction of the pyramid temple of Sahure. Göttinger Miszellen 4, 1973, pp 9-14.
Bryan, Betsy M. The Reign of Thutmose IV. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Dunand, Françoise and Christiane Zivie-Coche. Gods and men in Egypt: 3000 BCE to 395 CE. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Gaber, Amr Aly Aly. "Aspects of the Deification of some Old Kingdom Kings". in Eyma, A.K. and C.J. Bennett (eds). A Delta-Man in Yebu: occasional volume of the Egyptologist's Electronic Forum 1, 2003.
Ghalioungui, Paul. The House of Life: Per ankh. Magic and medical science in ancient Egypt. Amsterdam, B.M. Israel, 1973.
Peden, Alexander J. The graffiti of pharaonic Egypt: scope and roles of informal writings (c. 3100-332 B.C.) (Probleme der Ägyptologie 17). Boston, Brill, 2001.
Smoláriková, Květa. Abusir VII: Greek imports in Egypt: Graeco-Egyptian relations during the first millennium B.C.. Prague, Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, 2002.
Verner, Miroslav. Forgotten pharaohs, lost pyramids: Abusir. Prague, Academia Skodaexport, 1994.