Amateur Thealogy

To find the postings where these books and journal articles have been referenced, check the authors' names in the tags.

( Partial bibliography for this LJ )

An annotated list of journal articles, and scholarly and popular books, compiled from my own reading. (Last update: 10 February 2007.)

( Inanna/Ishtar Bibliography )

A small bibliography from my own reading.

( Sekhmet and related goddesses bibliography )

Pharaonic-Era Sacred Lake Unearthed in Egypt, ABC News 15 October 2009 [Temple of Mut at Tanis]

Messages from the past become easy to read: USC researchers are producing crisp images of inscriptions and artifacts from biblical Israel and other Near Eastern locales and putting the pictures online. [Using a thing that looks like the Large Hadron Collider!] LA Times 2 November 2009

An introductory "Thematic Essay" on Ugarit from the Met.

And from the Met as well, a stunning Lotiform Cup from the Third Intermediate Period.

The Real Story of Nazi Egyptology, Heritage Key 1 September 2009. "Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Germany will automatically focus on the peoples akin to us in terms of race and mind; Egyptology and Assyriology will recede into the background." Blimey.

A splendid Durga at the National Gallery of Australia. Note that the goddess' lion is biting the buffalo demon on the bum.

Also from the NGA: the remarkable Bronze Weaver, a 1400 year old statue from Indonesia.

Stone Age humans crossed Sahara in the rain, New Scientist 9 November 2009

Babylon's Ancient Wonder, Lying in Ruins, Washington Post 28 July 2009

An oldie but a goodie: New Women of the Ice Age, Discover April 1998

Ivory 'Venus' is first depiction of a woman [Venus of Hohle Fells], New Scientist 13 May 2009

Brutal Destruction of Iraq's Archaeological Sites Continues, Huffington Post 21 September 2009

Beads: Ritual and Ornamentation – What Africa's Khoe-San were wearing 77,000 years ago, Heritage Key 3 November 2009

Check Your Venus Fantasies at the Door, Gentlemen, Archaeology 15 May 2009

"God is the potter, not Harry". Hee.

"Words to be said by (to? before?) Bastet, mistress of Bubastis, the fear of whom is great in Iunet [Dendara], The Eye of Atum in Tarer [Dendara], the great Eye of Re who shines on the horizon, who brings light to men of light, whose face is beautiful, the uraeus of Horakhty.

While the Mistress of the Two Lands, the Powerful One in the Divine, whose numen is recognised in the Temple of the Sistrum, shines in the sky, illuminates the shadow, brings light to all the shadow with her rays, she is the mistress of light amongst the goddesses, the people look on when she shines."

Inscription from the temple of Hathor at Dendara (2nd register, tableau II, in which the pharoah offers the wadjet-eye) - my dubious translation from Cauville's French!

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Cauville, Sylvie. Dendara: Traduction. Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta 81. Leuven, Peeters, 1998.

Words to be said:

Oh Re, come to your daughter for a scorpion has stung her on a lonely road! Her cries have reached heaven. Come to your daughter! The poison has entered her body and it has spread in her flesh. She has put her mouth to the ground. See, the poison has entered her body! Do come with your power, with your rage, with your wrath! See, it is concealed from you, now that it has entered the whole body of this cat under my fingers!

Do not be afraid, my glorious daughter. Here I am behind you. I am the one who is going to slay the poison that is in all the limbs of this cat.

You cat here - your head is the head of Re, the lord of the Two Lands who punishes the subjects and all the rebels. The fear for him is in all the lands of all the living for ever.

You cat here - your eyes are the eye of the lord of the Glorious Eye who spends light on the Two Lands with his eyes, who spends light on a face on a road in darkness.

(Each part of the cat in turn is identified with a deity - nose with Thoth, ears with the Lord-of-all, mouth with Atum, neck with Nehebkau, thighs with Montu, shanks with Khonsu-in-Thebes-Neferhotpe, arms (paws) with Horus. Here are some examples:)

You cat here - your breast is the breast of Thoth, the lord of righteousness.
He has given you air to let your throat inhale. He has given air to the intestines of this cat.

You cat here - your heart is the heart of Khentekhtai, the lord of Athribis, the chief of the gods who keeps hearts and breasts firmly in their places. He has kept your heart in its place, your breast in its frame.

You cat here - your hands (claws) are the hands of the Great Ennead and of the Little Ennead. Your hands (claws) are saved from the poison of any biting snake.

You cat here - your belly is the belly of Osiris, the lord of Busiris. He has not permitted the poison to exercise any of its power in the belly of this cat.

You cat here - your feet are the feet of Amun, the great one, the lord of Thebes. He has kept your feet on the ground, he has slain the evil poison that is in all the limbs of this cat.

You cat here - your footsoles are the footsoles of Isis and Nephthys, who passed through all the lands. They make the poison pass on to the earth for this cat.

You cat here - your buttocks are the buttocks of Mehet-Weret.

You cat here - there are no limbs in you devoid of a god. Each one of them is the protection of your body, from your head to your footsoles. They have slain and punished the poison of any male snake, any female snake, any scorpion and any reptile that is in any limbs of this cat under my fingers... See, Isis has spun and Nepthys has woven against the poison... Oh evil poison which is in all the limbs of this cat, which suffers - come, go down to the earth!

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Borghouts, J.F. Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1978. (Spell 87, pages 56-58.)

Oh my gawd, there's a healing spell on the Metternich stela in which a cat stung by a scorpion identifies herself with Bastet and appeals to Ra. That is the best thing I ever heard. (ETA: Actually, it's the exorcist who calls the cat "Daughter of Re".)

With a view to scribbling something for ibarw next year, I'm reading up on Egypt's southern neighbours, the Nubians, and in particular the exchange of religious ideas between the two regions. For now, this posting will be a catch-all for links and notes.

In no particular order, then:

Nubia Museum, Egypt

Sudanese photographer Vit Hassan: Meroe is one of archaeology’s greatest mysteries, Sudan Watch blog, 4 July 2009

Treasure of the Nubians on the Nile, Sunday Gazette Mail, 22 October 2009 ["Lost Kingdoms of the Nile" exhibition]

Nubia: Lost civilisation of Egypt, BBC 25 March 2009

A Golden Trove, Long Scattered, Shines Once More
, New York Times, 5 December 1993 ["The Gold Of Meroe" exhibition]

The Black Pharaohs, National Geographic, February 2008

Uncovering Treasures of Ancient Nubia, New York Times, 27 February 1994 ["Ancient Nubia: Egypt's Rival in Africa" exhibition]

Pamela Rose's Quest to Save a Dark Age Settlement in Qasr Ibrim, Nubia, Heritage Key, 26 October 2009

Barbara Racker on Neighbourly Relations Between Nubia and Egypt, Heritage Key, 5 November 2009

Letter from Sudan: The Gold of Kush, Archaeology magazine, November/December 2009

Rare Nubian King Statues Uncovered in Sudan, National Geographic, February 2003

The Meroitic Newsletter

Unlocking More Secrets of Nubian Civilization, New York Times, 11 February 1992

A large number of recorded public lectures given at the California Museum of Ancient Art are available on CD. I hugely enjoyed a 1987 talk by Dr William Fulco titled "The Love Goddess in Western Semitic Tradition" - here are a few notes from that.

As an example of cultural exchange between Hurrian and Vedic culture, Fulco compares the depiction of Kali with a description of a victorious Anat, who wears a necklace of heads and a girdle of hands.

Fascinatingly, Fulco suggests that goddesses such as Anat and Athirat may be the active versions of the things their corresponding gods represent; for example, where Baal is the war, Anat is the actual fighting. (I think there's got to be a comparison here with the Hindu idea of Shakti.) He connects the ambiguous sexuality which crops up throughout ANE religion. Later in the talk, discussing the significance of names, he remarks that Anat and other goddesses are sometimes called the "Name of Baal" - that is, "an external manifestation of [Baal's] personality"; "that reality visible and manifested to the outside - that you can interrelate with". Fulco also relates this to the feminine spirit of God in the Bible.

Regarding the question of whether Asherah was the consort of Yahweh, Fulco suggests that she was seen that way in popular rather than "normative" worship (and hence all the condemnations of the practice in the Bible, which "give you a picture of what's actually going on"!)

Regarding the relationship ANE religions and Christianity, Fulco rather wonderfully says: "If I may put it in a faith context, if the Incarnation means anything, it means coming in the language people understand... Near Eastern mythology, mythological language, forms of worship and so on were things people understood, and I think that's what the Incarnation means, it means to use those, change those... I feel quite comfortable with it. It gives me a sense of historical context."

There's an exhibition of Egyptian art on at the Australian Museum, including a terrific Sekhmet. (Every museum has one - they're like those bits of Ashurbanipal's palace that turn up everywhere.) After much squinting and trying to decipher the inscriptions, getting just a few words, I caved and looked them up: "The Son of Re, whom he loves, Amenhotep, Ruler of Thebes, beloved of Ptah, of Sakhmet, the Mistress of Tepnef, to whom is given life. The good god, the Lord of the Two Lands, Nebmaatre, beloved of Sakhmet, the Mistress of Tepnef, to whom is given life." But where the heck is Tepnef?

ETA: Also, this striking statuette of a lion-headed goddess enthroned in front of an obelisk. The exhibition's label noted that there wasn't any way to be sure which of several goddesses this represents, but the museum's Web site reckons it's probably Sekhmet. Close up you can see that the goddess was once holding a sceptre; I wonder if that's the basis of the tentative identification.

ETA: I think I know what the "Mistress of Tepnef" thing is all about. In The Great Goddesses of Egypt, Barbara Lesko notes that: "The goodwill of this fierce goddess was certainly desired, and inscriptions on the statues set up along the lakeshore at the Mut precinct suggest that they were donated from various parts of the country, as if an all-out national effort was being made to respond to a crisis". (p 140)
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Lesko, Barbara S. The Great Goddesses of Egypt. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1999.

The Seeds of Civilization (Çatalhoyuk), Smithsonian May 2005

Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium BC from the Mediterranean to the Indus - 2003 Metropolitan Museum exhibition

Saving Iraq's Treasures, Smithsonian June 2003

Unearthing Egypt's Greatest Temple (Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III), Smithsonian October 2007

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 Bast, 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.

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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.
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.
Verner, Miroslav. Forgotten pharaohs, lost pyramids: Abusir. Prague, Academia Skodaexport, 1994.

"In order to understand the place of the moon in the cosmos, it should be remembered that the Egyptians conceived of the sky as a gigantic face which, like the human face, has two eyes. These are the sun and the moon, the right and left eye respectively. In a hymn we read: 'both thy eyes move in a circle, day and night; thy right eye is the sun-disc, thy left is the moon.'" (p 115)

"Just as a sun-eye is mentioned in connection with Re, so is mention made of a moon-eye. In itself the sun-eye is constant. The moon-eye continually changes its shape. This fact has given rise to the forming of mythical conceptions about the wounding of the eye in which Thoth plays a prominent role." (p 117)

In the Pyramid Texts, Horus and Seth battle; Horus damages Seth's testicles and Seth destroys Horus' eye. Thoth pacifies both combatants and heals their wounds. Bleeker suggests this is a "moon-myth": "It was only natural that this metamorphosis [the phases of the moon] be conceived of as a mutilation. Who is better able to heal this wound than the moon-good himself?... he makes the eye healthy and full again." (p 127) Seth makes off with Horus' eye, but Thoth retrieves it, saying: "I have returned from searching for the Horus-eye, I have brought it back." He makes the eye "full", that is, complete and intact: this is the wd3t-eye, "the symbol of divine life which can overcome death." (p 125) This is of course analogous to Thoth's retrieval of the sun-eye from a foreign land in the myth of the Distant Goddess.

On to Hathor and the other sun-eyes, Sekhmet and Tefnet.

Hathor, writes Bleeker, has an "inflammable temperament", which can be calmed by the sound of the sistrum (p 59-60) - possibly imitating the sound of the wind in the reeds in the wild cow's marshy home - and by dancing and general festivity - music, acrobats, drinking, etc. At Edfu one text describes the gods playing the sistrum and the goddesses dancing "to dispel her bad temper". (p 57) At Deir el-Bahri there's "a representation of a festive procession held on New Year's day in which Libians (sic) demonstrate their famous art of dancing... to commemorate the arrival from Nubia of Tefnet". (p 56)

Like Tefnut, Hathor is a sun-eye and an angry goddess who needs pacifying. "... Hathor was thought to be identical with Wpš, 'the beautiful shape of Tefnet', or in other words the appearance of he goddess whose rage has cooled down and who is benevolent." (p 68) A calendar makes the link between the two goddesses explicit, with Hathor's festival on 19-21 Tybi said to celebrate her return from Bwgm, the foreign land from which Thoth brought Tefnut home. (p 91)

Hathor is "the mistress of fear" (p 83) of whom it was said, "Hathor is as wrathful as Sechmet and as joyful as Bast." (p 70)

Right, that'll do for now. More in a bit...

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Bleeker, C.J. Hathor and Thoth: Two Key Figures of the Ancient Egyptian Religion. Leiden, Brill, 1973.

Now, my particular interest in Hathor is where she intersects with Sekhmet and Tefnut, as the sun-eye, and as a wrathful goddess who needs to be appeased. So these notes will reflect that.

But first, some other goddesses entirely:

Bleeker points out that "as cow-goddess, Hathor does not represent the peaceful domesticated animal, but the wild cow that lived in the originally marshy area of the Delta" - a symbol of "fertile, abundant life" (p 30). This made my ears prick up, because Enheduanna addresses Inanna as "impetuous wild cow". Hathor's titles include "monarch of the sky" or "queen of the heavens", which recalls Ishtar's title "Queen of Heaven", and Bleeker even describes her multifaceted nature as "paradoxical" (p 102), recalling similar characterisations of Inanna/Ishtar as a "paradox" (eg by Rivkah Harris). I'm not clear, though, on how similar the Egyptian pt and the Mesopotamian an or anu really are - exactly where the gods and the afterlife were located in Egyptian thought seems to be more complicated than just "heaven". Nor am I clear on whether Inanna the wild cow is a symbol of fertility or dangerousness (or both). Research is indicated.

ETA: Discussing Thoth, Bleeker suggests it's in the nature of deities to be inconsistent - "his behaviour is occasionally contrary to what human rationality and ethics would expect." (p 132)

As mistress of the western desert, Hathor was associated with goddesses such as Meretseger, "she who loves silence". Bleeker says this is "a characteristic name for a death-goddess, for the realm of the dead is a aphonous land where silence reigns, where the dead find peace and quiet." (pp 42-43)

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Bleeker, C.J. Hathor and Thoth: Two Key Figures of the Ancient Egyptian Religion. Leiden, Brill, 1973.

Here follow my (idiosyncratic as ever) notes from C.J. Bleeker's Hathor and Thoth.

Firstly - general stuff about Egyptian religion:

"S. Morenz, for example, has pointed out that the Egyptian language has no words for 'belief', 'religion', and 'piety'... apparently the Egyptians had not yet attained that stage of self-reflection in which general concepts are formed, and furthermore it would seem that the structure of their religion differed from that of ours." (p3) Their knowledge - of all kinds - was more about "know-how" than abstract philosophy. (p6) Religious thought was conservative, with basic ideas surviving for millennia. (p 8) By contrast with Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, "The ancient religions were not founded, but sprang forth as it were, from the life of the common people." Rather than "prophetic pronunciations", knowledge of the gods came through their manifestations in nature. (p 11) Unlike other cultures of the time, the Egyptians had an "intimacy" with and "affinity" for their gods, identifying with them and expecting to "partake of the divine life" after death. (p 19-20)

The religious literature comes in these flavours:

• hymns
  
• rituals
  
• funerary texts
  
• spells
  
• books of wisdom
  
• legends

As Bleeker points out, these mostly have "a cultic significance" - there's no formal doctrine or theology. Because of this, our understanding relies on "many scattered allusions in the texts". This problem is referred to throughout the book - some familiar legends have been stitched together from bits, rather than occuring in a single story, like a Greek myth. (4-5)

Oh cool - the pyramid is a model of the primeval mound which rose above the formless waters, from which Re organised the world. (16-17)

ETA: "Egyptian gods are not distinguised by any individual features" - you can only tell them apart by their animal heads and/or their attributes, such as headdresses and staffs.

ETA ETA: "In Egypt the saying was that in the primordial age the creator 'knotted' the world, ie, the two lands, meaning he created and planned them. The knot and woven fabric are tokens of integral life and wisdom." (p 59)

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Bleeker, C.J. Hathor and Thoth: Two Key Figures of the Ancient Egyptian Religion. Leiden, Brill, 1973.

Now, this is interesting. You may've encountered the loopy anti-Islamic claim that Allah is really an idol - a Middle Eastern moon-god - perhaps via Jack Chick. I was perusing an extensive lay refutation of the claim, and discovered that (amongst other things) it relies on one of the great traps which everyone from qualified scholars to Neo-Pagan online shops falls into: assuming that if deities share a similarity - even just similar names - then they're the same deity.

Coincidentally, I've just read Henri Frankfort's "Excursis" on the Dying God of the Ancient Near East in Kingship and the Gods. It was, tbh, a bit hard to follow and a bit light on footnotes, but Frankfort's basic argument is solid: there are major differences between gods such as Osiris, Tammuz, and Adonis; lumping them together as variations on the same god ignores those differences and impedes rather than increases understanding. Which is a useful reminder when you're reading about Egyptian deities, all right, with their complicated, shifting interconnections; or if just generally, if you happen to be a Neo-Pagan. Especially if you're shopping. :)

Having a bit of a bookmark cleanup here. :)

• Stelae from Deir el Medina at the Turin Museum. Some lovely colour pics here, including images of Renenutet, Qudshu, Raettawy, and the mysterious "Great Cat". (My favourite is the eensy stela to Meretseger, with the cobra goddess enjoying her beer and lotus. :)
  
  
• I am an absolute sucker for stick-figure versions of the Book of the Dead, which are elegant and comical at the same time. Check out the two-headed deity from the tomb of Thutmosis III (first picture, at left), and the schematised gods from the Litany of Re in the same tomb (interrupted, rather wonderfully, by a cheerful-looking cat).
  
  
• I was a bit silly last night, and the black-on-yellow illustrations from the Book of Caverns (scroll down to see them) gave me the giggles - as a mate pointed out, it looks like a video game gone mad.
  
  
• Lovely colour snaps of the burial chamber of Inherkhau - I'd seen lots of pieces of this, but here's the whole shebang.
  
  
• Finally, just to be thoroughly miscellaneous: No More God Spot?

Further to yesterday's posting, I did a little more Googling, and found a passage from the Kriol Baibul which includes the word drimin:

"Tudei na ai sabi nomo eni drimin jidan iya, oni det trubala God blanga Isreil."

This is from 2 Kings 5:15, where Naaman, miraculously cured of his leprosy, declares: "Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel." (NIV)

With the help of an online Kriol dictionary, I can stumblingly render the Kriol translation as, "Today surely I know that no other Dreaming lives here, only that true God of Israel."

(Kriol is of course a creole, a fully-fledged language with its own syntax and grammar, spoken by around thirty thousand people in the north of Australia. But it's kind of fun to spot the bits of Pidgin English incorporated into its vocabulary - "today", "savvy", "belong", etc.)

• An ABC Radio National podcast, The Religion Report, describes the first complete Bible translation in an indigenous language. One of the translators remarks on the similarities between traditional Aboriginal life and the nomadic Hebrews, but what caught my attention was this remark: "Some have taken quite a bit of talking around, just to try and find an appropriate way of translating certain concepts. Perhaps one of the most interesting I think is the word we've used for idols and false gods, and that's 'dreamin' or 'dreamin shape'." (I think the Kriol word is more correctly spelled drimin.) That approach, IIUC equating traditional Indigenous beliefs with the forbidden and disreputable foreign gods of the Old Testament (ie the very subject of this blog :) contrasts sharply with efforts to meld Christian and traditional Dreaming concepts, as in Rainbow Spirit Theology.
  
  
• Yantras!
  
  
• 108 Names of Durga
  
  
• The Neolithic Village of Ain Ghazal
  
  
• New news: New Kingdom Temple Discovered in the Sinai (April 2009)
  
  
• Old news: "Beyond Babylon" at the Met (2008); The dangerous life of a devadasi (2008) - the historical context starts on page 4; 'Forgotten' head-dresses shed light on Mesopotamian death rites (2004); Divided goddess to become whole again (1998)