Hathor

Definition

Hathor (Egyptian Hwt-Hr, "House of Horus") is one of Egypt's greatest goddesses — a sky-goddess of many domains: motherhood and joy, music and love, foreign lands, and the afterlife. In her celestial aspect she is a solar sky-goddess, often shown as a cow, and she has been read as a personification of the Milky Way. Her great temple stands at Dendera, whose ceiling carries the famous circular Dendera Zodiac. (See Dendera Zodiac for that monument.)

In Tradition

Egyptologists treat Hathor as a goddess of unusually wide reach, possibly going back to predynastic times, whose name written as a falcon within a walled enclosure literally means "the house of Horus." Among her many roles she is a solar sky-goddess and a great celestial cow — "the great wild cow" — and as wife, daughter, or "Eye" of the sun-god Re she is woven directly into solar religion.

In Practice

For Egyptian astral religion, Hathor is the sky understood as a great cow and as a solar feminine power. As the celestial cow she belongs to a cluster of cow-goddess imagery in which the sky and the daily Sun are read through her form; a related first-Dynasty cow-figure, once read as Sothis but now identified as Sekhet-Hor ("Field-of-Horus"), shows how easily these cow-deities were confused with star-goddesses in the early record. Her chief cult site, the temple of Dendera, is where the Dendera Zodiac — the circular relief that fuses the imported Babylonian twelve-sign zodiac with Egyptian decans — was carved into the ceiling, which is why Hathor's temple is the single clearest monument of the Egyptian-Babylonian astronomical merger. Keep Hathor the goddess distinct from the Dendera Zodiac monument itself.

Historical Origin

Hathor is attested from early dynastic times and across the whole of Egyptian history. The Sekhet-Hor cow-deity reinterpretation of the first-Dynasty Horus-Djer tablet is argued by G. Godron (BIFAO 57, 1958) and accepted by Parker in Neugebauer & Parker, *Egyptian Astronomical Texts* Vol III (1969), discussed in Clagett, *Ancient Egyptian Science* Vol II. The Dendera temple and its zodiac ceiling date to the Ptolemaic-Roman period (c. 50 BCE). Standard reference: Richard H. Wilkinson, *The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt* (2003).

Further Reading

• Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
• Marshall Clagett, Ancient Egyptian Science, Volume II: Calendars, Clocks, and Astronomy