Sehetepnes (sḥtp.n.s, Ninth Hour of the Night)

Definition

Sehetepnes (Egyptian sḥtp.n.s, also transliterated shtp.n.s) is a named hour of the night in the Egyptian Book of Nut — the name for the ninth hour, the moment when the sun god Re withdraws from the Duat (the underworld) toward mankind. The Book of Nut commentary glosses it plainly: "He is accustomed to withdraw to the sky in the hour Sehetepnes (i.e., the ninth hour)." The same name also turns up, with a textual difficulty, for the first hour of evening, when Re enters the body of Nut.

In Tradition

Marshall Clagett treats Sehetepnes as one of the named night-hours of the Egyptian Book of Nut, attested in the Sethy I cenotaph text and in the Roman-period Carlsberg-papyrus commentary. It marks the ninth hour of the night, when Re comes up out of the Duat toward the earth. The commentary preserves a long-noted difficulty: the same name is glossed for both the ninth night-hour and the first (the commentator says "third") evening-hour — a mismatch left unresolved.

In Practice

Sehetepnes shows that Egyptian timekeeping was not only numbered but named, and that the names carried meaning about the cosmos. The hours of the night were not neutral intervals but stations in the journey of Re through the body of the sky-goddess Nut: each hour had a name marking what the sun god does within it. Sehetepnes — the ninth hour — names the turning point at which Re ends his nightly passage through the Duat and begins his return toward the world of the living, "withdrawing toward mankind." Reading the Book of Nut, you see the named hours working as a religious-astronomical story laid over the same twelve-hour night that the decanal star clocks measured by observation. The textual difficulty — sḥtp.n.s standing for both the ninth night-hour and the first evening-hour — is itself telling: it shows ancient commentators already wrestling with inconsistencies in the cosmological text as handed down, and is kept verbatim in modern critical editions rather than quietly corrected.

Historical Origin

Sehetepnes is attested in the Book of Nut, whose primary witness is the cenotaph of Sethy I at Abydos (19th Dynasty, c. 1290 BCE), with a commentary preserved in the Roman-period Papyrus Carlsberg I. The name and its ninth-hour gloss appear in Document III.12 of Marshall Clagett's Ancient Egyptian Science, Volume II (1995), translated from the Sethy I text and the Carlsberg commentary; the first-hour / ninth-hour difficulty is discussed by Neugebauer and Parker in Egyptian Astronomical Texts, Volume I.

Etymology

Origin: Egyptian. Meaning: sḥtp.n.s — a Book of Nut hour-name; the ninth hour of the night.

Further Reading

• Marshall Clagett, Ancient Egyptian Science, Volume II: Calendars, Clocks, and Astronomy
• Otto Neugebauer & Richard A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts, Volume I: The Early Decans