Goddesses of Ancient Egyptians

Religious customs from the ancient Near East can be a deep informant of formative stirring for the contemporary dancer, poet, painter, or Pagan practitioner. The dimensions, personalities, and levels of deities are often a mirror for our private human foibles, and many taking stories have come down to us direct the centuries. This selective information about the goddesses of ancient Egypt may cheer your personal creative versions.  

List of Egyptians Goddesses




·  Goddess Shai 


Goddess Mehit

Goddess Mehit name

Goddess Mehit
Goddess Mehit or (Hatmehit) in the ancient Egyptian faith was a fish-goddess in the area around  the delta city of Per-banebdjedet, Mendes  In ancient Egyptian art Mehit was represented either as a fish, or a woman with a fish emblem or crown on her head. She was a goddess of life and security. Her name transforms as Foremost of Fish or Chief of Fish. She may have some connector to Hathor, one of the best deities of Egypt who also went by the name Mehit, meaning great flood. This may maybe be due to being seen as a end of the primal waters of creation from which all things arose. Other goddesses connected with the primal waters of universe are Mut and Naunet.

When the rage of Osiris arose, the people of Mendes reacted by identifying Osiris as having attained his agency by being the husband of Mehit. In certain, it was the Ba of Osiris, known as Banebjed (literally meaning Ba of the lord of the djed, consulting to Osiris), which was said to have married Mehit. When God Horus  got  taken  the  son  of  Osiris,  a  form  known  as  Harpocrates  (Har-pa-khered  in  Egyptian), Mehit was accordingly said to be his mother. As wife of Osiris, and mother of Horus, she eventually became identified as a form of Isis.

Goddess Taweret

Goddess Taweret name

Goddess Taweret
Goddess Taweret was a house deity,  Taweret  the  pregnant  hippopotamus goddess  was  the  patron  of  pregnant  women.  She helped  in  childbirth  and  observed  over  young children.  Because  of  her  cool  nature  and  kindly disposition,  she  was  a  favorite  family  goddess. Amulets in the shape of the goddess were raised by  the  hundreds  and  broken  by  pregnant  women. Small  figurines  of  Taweret  were  often  kept  in home  shrines.  It  was  thought  that  her  fierce show the head of a river horse, the arms and legs of a feline, the tail of a crocodile, and long flat breasts would ward off any evil spirits and  keep  the  women  and  children  of  the  house safe.  Stone  vases  were  engraved  in  her  image  with  a perforation at one of her nipples so that milk could be streamed from the vase while magical spells were recited  to  cure  children  stung  by  scorpions.  Her name way the great one and her attribute is the SA sign, a restrictive sign in the shape of a papyrus life preserver used by boaters, held in her left paw. The Greek writer Plutarch says she was the concubine of the evil god Set but that she eventually deserted him for Horus the falcon god.

Goddess Hatmehit


Goddess Hatmehit name
Goddess Hatmehit (left) with other deities
Goddess Hatmehit was a Goddess of the city of Mendes in the Delta, stood for as a Nile cavil or as a woman with a fish emblem on her head, Hat-mehit was hidden by the ram-god Baeb Djet at Mendes. She  was eventually considered as his associate. Her name Hatmehit or (Hat-mehit) meaning (first of  the fishes).

Goddess Ta-Bitjet

Goddess Ta-Bitjet name

Goddess Ta-Bitjet was a Scorpion-goddess called wife of God Horus in a number of magico-medical turns against vicious bites.The power of the spell stems from the magic of the blood that flowed when Horus took her maidenhood.

Goddess Baalat


Goddess Baalat name
Goddess Baalat was a Canaanite goddess connected plausibly via her obligation for products valued by the Egyptians with Hathor. Her name means schoolmarm and she is clearly the light counterpart to God Baal. In her role as Baalat Gebal schoolma'am of Byblos she  protects the  cedar-wood trade between Lebanon and Egypt which goes back to the reign of King Sneferu (4th Dynasty). Her significance parallels that of Hathor of Dendera who is described as dwelling at Byblos. In the Sinai peninsula the peacock blue mines at Serabit  el-Khadim  were  protected  by Hathor. In the temple of Goddess Hathor, there is a small sandstone sphinx written by the dedicator both with the name of the Egyptian deity, in hieroglyphics, and with the name of Baalat, in an early alphabetised script.

Goddess Unut

Goddess Unut name

Goddess Unut
Goddess Unut was a rabbit or hare goddess of Egypt, serving as a patroness of Thebes. She was the associate of Unu, the hare god, and she was described in the totems of the Theban nome and as part of the Was Scepter.

Goddess Mehurt


Goddess Mehurt name
Goddess Mehurt
Goddess Mehurt or (Mehet-Weret) was the  great  celestial  cow  who  gave  have to the ocean of the sky, Mehurt was read to be the birth mother of the sun god Ra. Because of this, she is related with Nut, the sky goddess who passes birth to the sun at the dawn of every day. When Ra was born, Mehurt took him between her horns as a sun disk, and she gone linked with Hathor, whose crown is a sun disk betwixt her horns. Later this became the crown of Isis. She is nearly always read as a cow, and her name agencies the great flood. Her delegacies are  easy  broken  with Hathor, because each is oftentimes  shown  as  a  recumbent cow lying on a reed felt, a sun disk betwixt the horns. In the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 B.C.),  Mehurt looks in the Pyramid Texts of Unas: Unas  has related his pools which are on the trusts of the canal of Mehurt, at the place where oblations flourish, and areas  on  the  horizon,  and  he  has  named  his  garden expand on the banks of the horizon.

By the New Kingdom (1550-1069 B.C), Mehurt had grown a goddess of rebirth, especially for those souls trusting to resurrect in the Netherworld. The Book of the Dead (Chapter XXVII) tells us, I behold Ra who was born yesterday from the goddess Mehurt . . it is the white abyss of heaven ..  it is the image of the eye of Ra in the morning at his yearly birth. Mehurt is the eye of Ra. In different myth Ra claims to have created Mehurt with the help of Isis and her magical spells. When Tutankhamens  tomb  was  given  in 1922, a funerary couch was observed in his tomb in the shape of the celestial cow. Mehurt was there to aid him when he entered the Netherworld. As a goddess of  rebirth  and  resurrection,  Mehurt  evolved  into  a sponsor or guardian of the necropolis on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes.

Goddess Renenutet

Goddess Renenutet name

Goddess Renenutet receives
papyrus plants from
Thutmose IV (Stella of
Thutmose IV)
Goddess Renenutet was an Egyptian goddess of good luck, she was taken an incarnation of Isis as the patroness of harvests. She was also worshiped as the heavenly cobra that entertained the pharaohs. A temple dedicated to Renenet was erected in the Faiyum during  the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 B.C.E.). She was also affiliated with the cults of Hathor and other goddesses relating harvests, fate, happiness, and childbearing.

Goddess Heket


Goddess Heket name
Goddess Heket
Goddess Heket was one of the particular radical of eight deities that form the Ogdoad, the basis of the Hermopolis creation myth. Heket was the female twin of Hek, a god  of  space.  She  later  formulated into a frog goddess who assisted at childbirth. Heket is first referred in the Pyramid Texts (2345 b.c.), a mathematical group of magical inscriptions, in which she accompanies the spirit of the went king to his lay in the sky. Her most important  connexion  was  with  childbirth, a distinction she shared with Bes and Tauret, who also saved mothers and children. Heket was especially addressed upon during the last levels of labor. A Middle Kingdom papyrus (2055-1650 b.c.) tells how Heket attended the wife of the high priest of Re when she was about to give birth to the future king.

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.

Goddess Astarte


Goddess Astarte name
Goddess Astarte (Ishtar)
Goddess Astarte or (Ishtar) was a goddess starting in Syria and took into Egypt in the New Kingdom (1550-1070 B.C.E.). Amenhotep II (1427-1401 B.C.E.) erected a Stella observing her in Giza. She was given the rank of a daughter of the god Ra and was made a consort of Set. Astarte helped as the patroness of the pharaohs chariots in martial campaigns. She was depicted as a uncovered woman wearing the atef, or bulls horns. She had attended as a war goddess in Syria.

Goddess Sekhmet

Goddess Sekhmet name

Goddess Sekhmet
Goddess Sekhmet was a powerful war goddess of Egypt, the uprooter of pharaohs enemies, called "She Who Is Powerful". Sekhmet was a lioness  deity, the check of Ptah and the mother of Nefertum and Imhotep in Memphis A daughter of the God Ra, Sekhmet struck at evildoers and broken plagues. She also cured the righteous. Her clergymen were physicians and wizards.

Sekhmet had a modern role among the rulers of Egypt, as she was thought to bring about the innovation of the pharaohs. In the form  of a cobra she was called Mehen, and she possibly came from Nubia (modern Sudan) in the early eras. She  was  also visited the "eye of Ra".

Her statues normally depicted her as a woman with a lions lead, and at sentences she wore a sun disk on her point. In this form she was a warrior expression of the sun, getting flames to devour the oppositions of Egypt. In some eras, the gates of Sekhmet's temples were given as a signal of the onset of a military campaign. Amenemhat III (1844-1797 B.C.E.) admitted 700 statues of Sekhmet in his mortuary temple in Dashur. She  was also portrayed on the wall of the temple of Sahure (2458-2446 B.C.E.) at Abusir. This portrait acquired a widespread reputation for its weird cures.

Bubastis, The Loacation of Bastet's Cult

Bubastis (Tell-Basta-Egypt Delta)
Goddess Bastet was a local deity whose cult was centered in the city of Bubastis, now Tell Basta, which consisted the Delta near what  is  knew  as  Zagazig  today. The  town, knew in  Egyptian as (Per-Bast), carries her name, literally thinking "House of Bast". It was known in Greek as (Boubastis) and understood into Hebrew as P-beset. In the biblical Book of Ezekiel (30:17), the town looks in the Hebrew form Pibeseth

Goddess Bastet Festivals

Goddess Bastet holding a sistrum
Herodotus links that of the many solemn fetes held in Egypt, the most heavy and most popular one was that famous in Bubastis in honour of Bastet, whom he calls Bubastis and matches with the Greek goddess Artemis. Each year on the day of her festival, the town is said to have appealed some 700,000 visitors, both men and women (but not children), who came in many another crowded ships. The women engaged in music, song, and dance on their way to the place, great dedicates were made and significant amounts of wine were drunk, more  than was the case passim the year. This fits well with Egyptian sources which dictate that leonine goddesses are to be staid with the "feeds of drunkenness".

The goddess Bastet was sometimes drawn holding a ceremonial sistrum in one hand and an breastplate in the other the protection usually resembling a collar or gorget embellished with a lioness head.

Bastet was a lioness goddess of the sun throughout most of Ancient Egyptian history, but later when she was exchanged into a cat goddess (Bastet). She also was modified to a goddess of the moon by Greeks worrying Ancient Egypt toward the end of its civilisation. In Greek mythology, Bastet also is famous as Ailuros.

Bastet and Connection to Other Deities

The lioness represented the war goddess and shielder of both lands that would link as Ancient Egypt. As divine mother, and more particularly as protector, for Lower Egypt, Bast became strongly associated with Wadjet, the patron goddess of Lower Egypt. She eventually became Wadjet-Bast, paralleling the akin pair of patron (Nekhbet)  and  lioness  shielder  (Sekhmet) for Upper Egypt. Bast fought an evil snake described Apep. As the strong lion god Maahes of warm Nubia later became part of Egyptian mythology and put the role of the son of Bast, during the time of the New Kingdom, Bast  was  held to  be  the  daughter  of Amun Ra, a new up deity in the  Egyptian  pantheon  through that late dynasty. Bast become identified as his mother in the Lower Egypt,  near  the  delta.  Similarly  the  severe  lioness  war  goddess Sekhmet,  became  discovered  as  the  mother  of  Maashes  in  the  Upper Egypt.

Wadjet-Bastet (lioness head, solar disk, and the snake cobra)
Cats in ancient Egypt were feared highly, partly due to their ability to combat vermin such as mice, shops - which unsafe key food supplies,  and  snakes,  peculiarly  cobras.  Cats  of  royalty  were,  in  some exemplifies, known to be dressed in golden jewelry and were left to eat from their owners' scales. Turner and Bateson estimate that during the twenty-second dynasty (945-715 B.C), Bast worship modified from being a lioness deity into being a star cat deity. With the union of the two Egypts, many similar deities were agreed into one or the other, the import of Bast and Sekhmet, to the sectional cultures that merged, resulted in a retention of both, necessitating a change to one or the other.

The Ancient Egyptian pantheon was producing constantly. Through the 18th dynasty Thebes got the capital of  Ancient  Egypt  and  because  of  that,  their sponsor deity became  sovereign.The priests of the temple of Amun exchanged the relative height of other  deities  in  the  Egyptian pantheon. Decreasing  the  status  of  Bast,  they  leaded off relating to  her with  the  summed  post-fix, as "Bastet"  and  their  exercise  of  the  new  name  became  very  familiar  to Egyptologists. In the temple at Per-Bast some cats were discovered to have been mummified and buried, many beside their proprietors. More  300000  mummified  cats  were  discovered  when  Bast's  temple  at  Per-Bast  was  dug.  The  main source of data about the Bast cult comes from Herodotus who seen Bubastis some 450 BC during afterwards the modifications in the cult. He compared Bastet with the Greek Goddess Artemis. He saved extensively about the cult. Turner and Bateson indicate that the status of the cat was rough equivalent to that of the cow in modern India. The death of a cat might lead a family in great mourning and those who forced out would have them embalmed or forgot in cat cemeteries - indicating to the great prevalence of the cult of Bastet. Extensive sepultures of cat continues were found not only at Bubastis, but likewise at Beni Hasan (El_Minya) and  Saqqara. In 1888, a granger naked a plot of many hundreds  of thousands of cats in Beni Hasan.

Goddess Bastet

Goddess Bastet name

Goddess Bastet
Goddess Bastet was a goddess of ancient Egypt, whose Theophany was the cat, Bastets cult substance was at Bubastis. She was the defender of pregnant women and was a pleasance loving goddess who didst  as  the  patronne of music and dance. Bastet was also believed to protect men from diseases and ogres. The goddess was seen the prosopopoeia of the white rays of the sun on the Nile. She was usually represented as a woman with a cats head, holding a Sistrum and the symbolisation of life, the Ankh.

The goddess remained popular throughout  Egypt even to Roman sentences. Her festivals at  Bubastis  were between the most well-attended solemnizations in Egypt. People set out in festooned lighters, and music attended all who made the pilgrimage to her shrine.  The festival was a time of jokes as well as another shown period of drunkenness. A gigantic parade culminated the festivity, and on that day few Egyptians were sober. Shrines of the gods were erected in Rome, Pompeii, Nemi, and Ostia.

Other Roles of Bastet:

Goddess Renpet


Goddess Renpet name
Goddess Renpet was a goddess of the Egyptian year, and the Egyptian word for year, Renpet was very frequent in the late periods of Egypt. She was described as a woman wear various symbols of works and harvests. In some eras she was consociated with the solar cult of Sopdu, named Sirius, the Dogstar, by the Greeks. Sopdu signaled  the coming flood of the Nile each year.

Goddess Pakhet


Goddess Pakhet name
Goddess Pakhet
Goddess Pakhet was a lioness-goddess worshipped in particular at the capture of a wadi in the eastern desert near Beni Hasan (close to El-Minya). Her name  is very resonant of her nature, thinking she who snatches or the tearer. In the Coffin Texts Pakhet the Great is named as a night-huntress with strong hooks.

It is easy to see Greek settlers seeing in Pakhet device characteristics of  Artemis, goddess of the chase. Speos Artemidos (cave of Artemis) grown  the  common designation of Pakhets rock-chapel near Beni Hasan, sliced out of the limestone in the 18th Dynasty under Queen Hatshepsut and King Thutmose III.

Worship of Nephthys in the New Kingdom

The Ramesside Pharaohs were  particularly  devoted  to Set's prerogatives and, in the 19th Dynasty, a temple of Nephthys named the "House of Nephthys of Ramses-Meriamun" was built or refurbished in the town of Sepermeru, center between Oxyrhynchos and Herakleopolis, on the outskirts of the Faiyum and quite near to the modern situation of Deshasheh. Here, as Papyrus Wilbour bills in its wealth of revenue enhancement records and land appraisals, the temple of Nephthys was a special cornerstone by Ramses II, set in close proximity to (or within) the precinct of the envelopment of Set. To be particular, the House of Nephthys was one of fifty individual, land-owning temples drawn for  this  portion  of  the  Middle  Egyptian  district  in  Papyrus  Wilbour. The  fields  and  other  holdings  belonging  Nephthys's temple were under the office of two Nephthys-prophets (named Penpmer) and one (named) wa'ab priest of the goddess.

Winged picture of Nephthys from the tomb of Seti I (New Kingdom)

While  certainly  affiliated  with  the  House  of  God Set,  the  Nephthys  temple  at  Sepermeru  and  its  spread  lands (different lands) clearly were under organization distinct from the Set innovation. The Nephthys temple was a special establishment in its hold right, an sovereign entity. According to Papyrus Wilbour, another "House of Goddess Nephthys  of  Ramses-Meriamun"  seems  to  have  existed to  the  northwest,  in  the  town  of  Su,  shorter  to  the  Faiyum region.

Otherwise  temple  of  Nephthys  seems  to  have  was  in  the  town  of  Punodjem.  The  Papyrus  Bologna  tapes  a complaint charged by a seer of the temple of Set in that town seeing undue taxation in his regard. After making an first appeal to "Re-Horakhte, Set, and Goddess Nephthys" for the last resolution of this issue by the royal Vizier, the prophet lamentations his workload. He notes his obvious government of the "House of God Set" and adds: "I am also responsible for the ship, and I am motor similarly for the House of Nephthys, along with a pile of other temples."

Equally  "Nephthys  of  Ramses-Meriamun,"  the  goddess  and  her  shrines  were  under  the  certain  second  of Ramses II. The innovations of the Set and Nephthys temples at Sepermeru at long last were discovered and named in the 1980, and the Nephthys temple was a individual temple complex inside the Set enclosure.

Nephthys and Saving Sister of Osiris

Goddess Nephthys plays an great role in the Osirian myth-cycle. It  is  Nephthys  who  helps  Isis  in  gathering  and  mourning  the discerp  portions  of  the  body  of  Osiris,  afterwards  his  murder  by  the jealous  Set.  Nephthys  also  serves  as  the  nursemaid  and  watchful defender  of  the  infant  Horus.  The  Pyramid Texts  bring up  to  Isis  as  the "birth-mother"  and  to  Nephthys  as  the  "nursing-mother"  of  Horus. Nephthys was attested as one of the four "Great Chiefs" ruling in the Osirian cult-center of Busiris, in the Delta and she comes out to have concerned an honorary view at the hallowed city of Abydos. No craze is certified for her there, though she certainly laced as a goddess of great importance in the annual rites taken, wherein two chose females or priestesses played the purposes of Isis and Nephthys and performed the certain  'Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys'.  There,  at  Abydos, Nephthys  linked  Isis  as  a  mourner  in  the  shrine  known  as  the Osireion. These "Festival Songs of Isis and Nephthys" were ritual elements  of  many  such  Osirian  rites  in  senior  ancient  Egyptian cult-centers.

Nephthys, as a mortuary goddess (along with Isis, Neith, and Serket), was one of the protectresses of the Canopic jars of the Hapi. God Hapi, one of  the  Sons  of  Horus,  guarded  the  embalmed  lungs.  Thus  we  find Nephthys invested with the name, "Nephthys of the Bed of Life," in  direct  source  to  her  regenerative  precedencies  on  the  embalming table. In the city of Memphis, Nephthys was punctually respected with the title "Queen  of  the  Embalmer's  Shop,"  and  there  related  with  the jackal-headed God Anubis as patron.

Nephthys  was  likewise  taken  a  festive  deity  whose  rites  could mandatory  the  liberal  consumption  of  beer.  In  distinct  reliefs  at  Edfu, Dendera,  and  Behbeit,  Nephthys  is  showed  receiving  lavish beer-offerings from the Pharaoh, which she would "return", using her power  as  a  beer-goddess  "that the pharaoh may  have  joy  with  no hangover." Elsewhere at Edfu, for instance, Nephthys is a goddess who applies the Pharaoh power to see "that which is covered by moonlight." This fits well with more frequent textual roots that view Nephthys to be a goddess whose unique area was darkness, or the perilous boundaries of the desert. Nephthys could also seem as one of the goddesses who assists at childbearing. One ancient Egyptian myth continued in the Papyrus Westcar recounts the tale of Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet, and Heqet as traveling social dancers in disguise, assisting the wife of a priest of Amun-Ra as she sets to bring forth sons who are certain for fame and fortune. Nephthys's  preventive  sciences  and  status  as  direct  twin  of  Isis,  steeped,  as  her  sister  in  "words  of  power,"  are evidenced by the abundance of faience amulets carved in her likeness, and by her mien in a variety of magical papyri that sought to summon her famously altruistic characters to the aid of mortals.

Goddess Nephthys

Goddess Nephthys name

Goddess Nephthys
Goddess Nephthys was the ancient Egyptian goddess, called the accord and female counterpart to Set, earlier addressed as Nebt-het, she was the  sister of Isis, Osiris, and  Set and  tricked Osiris into siring her son, Anubis. When Osiris was executed, Nephthys  aided  Isis in getting  his body  and resurrecting him. She was  part of the worshipped (mournings of Isis and Nephthys).

Nephthys was a patronne of the dead and was associated as well with the cult of God Min. She was also a member of the Ennead of Heliopolis. The  goddess  took  the form of a kite, a bird displayed in funerary processions, and she was the patroness of God Hapi, one of the Canopic Jar guardians. Her cult at Kom-Mer in Upper Egypt continued passim all historical periods. She was called the Lady  of  the  Mansions  or  the  Lady  of  the  Books.  She was also identified with the desert realms and was expert in magic. Nephthys is showed as a woman hard the hieroglyph for Castle on her head.

Other Roles of Nephthys:

Goddess Nehmetawy


Goddess Nehmetawy name
Goddess Nehmetawy was an ancient Egyptian goddess. She is not very widely famous. She was the wife of snake god Nehebu-kau, or in other places of worship, like in Hermopolis, the wife of Thoth. Her depicting are anthropomorph, with a sistrum-shaped headdress, much with a child in her lap.

Goddess Menhit


Goddess Menhit name
Goddess Menhit
A foreign war goddess, Menhit is the wife of God Anhur, both of whom may have grown in Nubia. Her name keys her as a goddess of force; it means she who massacres. Associated with Sekhmet, Menhit was seen as a feline goddess and often represented as a lioness. The Egyptian army believed that Menhit rode before of them to outsmart Egypts enemies with fiery arrows. She was favorite in Upper Egypt as the wife of God Khnum and the mother of God Heka.

Goddess Anat

Goddess Anat name

Goddess Anat
Goddess Anat or Anath was a goddess of the Canaanites, patronne of both love and war, Anat, always described as a pleasant young woman and named the Virgin, was the sister of the Semitic god Baal. Anat was respected as a goddess of  war  and  military campaigns  and  was  taken  by King Ramses II (1290-1224 B.C.E.) as one of his sponsors. In Egypt, Anat was depicted nude, standing on a lion and taking flowers. In the Ptolemaic Period (304-30 B.C.E.) Anat  was  mixed  with  Astarte, accepting  the  name "Astargatis". In other eras she was held Reshef and Baal as checks in rituals.

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