Hathor

Hathor is the Greek form of the Egyptian name Ḥwt-Ḥr, usually translated “House of Horus.” It can be read as the sky-house in which the falcon-god Horus dwells.

Love, beauty, music, dance, joy, motherhood and the sky. She was also tied to foreign lands and to the riches that came from them, such as turquoise, copper and incense.

As a cow; as a woman with cow horns holding a sun disk; and sometimes as a woman with cow ears. Her name-glyph and her face also appear on the sistrum and on “Hathor-column” capitals.

Her best-known cult centre was Dendera in Upper Egypt. The temple standing today dates mainly to the Ptolemaic and early Roman periods (first century BCE – first century CE), on a site used for far longer.

At Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai, Egyptian mining expeditions built a temple to Hathor as patron of the turquoise mines.

In the myth often called the Destruction of Mankind, the Eye of Ra goes out as a fierce goddess and is pacified. In that story the Eye appears as Hathor and as the lioness Sekhmet.

Especially at Thebes, Hathor was the goddess of the western necropolis and was shown receiving the dead into the West.

A cow-form Hathor suckles the king in reliefs, for example in the Hathor shrine at Deir el-Bahari. This expresses his divine legitimacy.

The sistrum, a rattle shaken in ritual, was a sacred instrument closely tied to Hathor. Isis, who took over many of Hathor’s symbols from the New Kingdom, is also shown with one.

Her link with Byblos, the port on the coast of modern Lebanon, goes back to the Old Kingdom, long before the Greco-Roman period. An alabaster offering plate of King Pepy I (Sixth Dynasty) found at Byblos names “Hathor, Mistress of Dendera,” and a scribe statuette of the same time reads “Hathor, Mistress of Dendera, who lives in Byblos.”

The explicit title “Lady of Byblos” is attested in Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts. Scholars read it as Egypt identifying Hathor with Byblos’s own goddess, Baalat Gebal. Egyptian texts stop linking the two after the New Kingdom, as Isis grew more prominent. This blending is a separate matter from the later Hathor and Isis blending.

A cylinder seal of King Khafre (Fourth Dynasty) found at Byblos bears Hathor’s name without any title. Some scholars take it as an earlier sign of the link. This is not settled.

The Punt reliefs in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahari say the expedition’s goods were sent “for Hathor, Mistress of Punt.” Punt was a source of incense and other luxury goods. It is believed to lie on the Red Sea coast of north-east Africa, and its exact location is debated.

Hathor’s cult reached Nubia with Egyptian expeditions and New Kingdom building there. A rock-cut chapel to “Hathor of Ibshek” stood at Faras, a Hathor temple stood at Mirgissa, and Ramesses II built the Small Temple at Abu Simbel for Hathor and Queen Nefertari. Who first built the Faras chapel is uncertain.

In later periods seven Hathors appear as fate-givers at a child’s birth. This is attested in Egyptian literature such as the Tale of the Doomed Prince.

In the Greco-Roman period Hathor and Isis were increasingly blended, and the Greeks identified Hathor with Aphrodite. This is separate from Hathor’s much older link with Byblos.

Cow-faced heads on the Narmer Palette (around 3100 BCE) are often linked with Hathor or with the related goddess Bat. Scholars disagree, so treat it as an open question.