Egyptian Planet-Names ("Horus-planets")

egyptian: Ḥr-planets

Definition

The Egyptian planet-names are the names the ancient Egyptians themselves gave the five visible planets — the ones that wander against the fixed stars. Egyptians kept the two great lights, the Sun and the Moon, in a class of their own, and counted the five planets as a separate group of "living" stars. Three of them — Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars — they named as forms of the falcon-god Horus, which is why scholars call them the "Horus-planets." Mercury and Venus were named differently and set apart from the other three.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read this naming as a window onto a genuinely Egyptian planet-theology that took shape before the Babylonian zodiac reached Egypt. In the New Kingdom tomb-ceiling depictions the planets tend to appear in a recurring order with fairly stable divine attributions: Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, each a Horus; then Mercury (tied to the god Seth) and Venus (tied to Osiris), set apart by a block of decan-stars.

In Practice

These names tell you a sky-image is being read on its own terms rather than through the imported zodiac. Each Horus-planet carries a distinct epithet — Saturn "Horus bull of the sky," Jupiter "Horus who illuminates (or bounds) the two lands," Mars "Horus of the horizon," later "Horus the red one." Mercury keeps an untranslatable name (Sebeg) and the god Seth; Venus is the phoenix-bird Bennu, and only late on the "morning star." The classical writer Achilles records the Egyptian ordering — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus — keeping the Sun and Moon out of the planet-list, unlike the Greek scheme that slots the Sun among them. On the temple of Hathor at Dendera the planets even appear as birds with telling heads — a bull's head on Saturn, an ape's on Mercury — so the painted iconography matches the written names. Keep this native system distinct from the later Greco-Egyptian planet-rulerships, which are a separate layer.

Historical Origin

The Horus-planet names are attested on New Kingdom astronomical ceilings — Senenmut (TT 353, c. 1473 BCE) and Seti I (KV 17, c. 1290 BCE) — and discussed by Joachim Quack in David Brown (ed.), The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science (2018), drawing on Neugebauer & Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts Vol III. The Achilles testimony is his Isagoge ch. 16. Belmonte and Lull treat the same names in Astronomy of Ancient Egypt (2018), tracing several back to the Pyramid Texts.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading