Goddess Heket name |
Goddess Heket |
Amulets and scarabs in the mold of a frog were often worn by pregnant women in the hope that Heket would serve them during labor. Magical inscriptions on ivory wands, modern in the Middle Kingdom, refer to Heket as the guardian of the home. A temple sacred to Heket was found at Qus in Upper Egypt, and there is a source to her furore in the tomb of Petosiris (fourth century b.c.) at Tuna el Gabel in Middle Egypt. Petosiris was a full priest of the god Thoth, and he showed on his tomb that Heket led him to a shrine full by the yearly deluge of the Nile and asked him to resort her temple. Petosiris says that he cited his scribe and gave him orders to figure a new temple with a wall around it to keep it safe from future floods of the Nile.
During the Eighteenth Dynasty, representations of Heket, with the consistency of a woman, are presented in the divine birth scenes of the king in Queen Hatshepsut temple at Deir el Bahari. In the Netherworld, Heket was present when the deceased was reborn. The frog contract in hieroglyphs was a secret writing for the phrase wehem ankh (doubling life), a phrase that started in the Middle Kingdom used to draw the deceased.