Horus Who Illuminates the Two Lands (Jupiter)

Definition

Horus Who Illuminates the Two Lands is one of the Egyptian names for the planet Jupiter (Egyptian Ḥr-wpš-tꜣwy). "The two lands" is the standard Egyptian phrase for the whole country — Upper and Lower Egypt joined. Jupiter is one of the three "Horus-planets," the visible planets the Egyptians named as forms of the falcon-god Horus, and it has the most varied and slippery name of them all.

In Tradition

Egyptologists treat Jupiter's name as the most textually fluid of the Horus-planets, shifting from one tomb-ceiling tradition to the next, often by simple wordplay. Scholars point out that Jupiter can rival or exceed Sirius at its brightest, so the Egyptians can hardly have missed it; some read an 11th-Dynasty coffin fragment as the planet's oldest surviving mention, putting it on record by the 11th Dynasty.

In Practice

The shifting name is the thing to watch with Jupiter. One ceiling tradition (the Senenmut family) writes "Horus who bounds the two lands"; another (the Seti IA family) writes the near-identical "Horus who illuminates the two lands" — the two spellings differ by a single sign-swap. Later forms drift further, into "Horus who opens the secret," "Horus the mystery," and even, by what some read as a non-meaningful pun, "Horus the merchant." In the painted sky-images Jupiter is a falcon-headed Horus in a boat with a star over his head; at Dendera his bird wears a falcon's head with cow's horns and a sun-disc between them. Some epithets place him in the sky — "the southern star," "follower of the sky." When you meet any of these Horus-of-the-two-lands forms in an Egyptian source, read them as variants of one planet, Jupiter, not as separate gods.

Historical Origin

Jupiter as "Horus who bounds the two lands" (Ḥr-tꜣš-tꜣwy) appears in the Senenmut ceilings (TT 353, c. 1473 BCE); "Horus who illuminates the two lands" (Ḥr-wpš-tꜣwy) in the Seti IA family; later forms in the Ramesseum and the tomb of Tausret. Belmonte and Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt (2018), read an 11th-Dynasty fragment of Heny's coffin as the oldest mention; discussed by Quack in Brown (ed.), The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science (2018).

Further Reading

• David Brown (ed.) / Joachim Friedrich Quack, The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science
• Juan Antonio Belmonte & José Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt
• Otto Neugebauer & Richard A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts, Volume III