Sopdu (Soped)

Definition

Sopdu is the Egyptian falcon-god of the eastern sky and Egypt's eastern frontier (Egyptian Spdw, sometimes Soped). He is the stellar son in the great sky-family: in the Pyramid Texts the dead king, as Osiris-Orion, fathers him on Isis in her form as the star Sothis (Sopdet, the star Sirius), and the child born of that union is Horus-Sopdu. He is shown as a falcon with two tall plumes. His name shares the spd root — "sharp" or "pointed" — and the texts even equate him with the deified king's teeth, an image of the falcon's sharp, pointed beak.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read Sopdu as a god of two faces. His astral face belongs to the Pyramid Texts star-genealogy, where he is the falcon-child of the Orion-Sirius pair (Sah and Sopdet). His worldly face is "lord of the east," guardian of the desert routes and the Sinai turquoise mines, later linked with Near Eastern gods. Sopdu is sometimes proposed as the male counterpart of Sopdet (Sirius), but the corpus is careful: that pairing is suggestive in the Old Kingdom texts and only becomes clear later.

In Practice

In Egyptian-tradition glossary work, Sopdu is the one to reach for when the sky is read as a family rather than a clock. Where Sah (Orion) is the father and Sopdet (Sirius) the mother, Sopdu is the heliacal "morning" child their union produces — the rising-sun falcon of the eastern horizon. Keep him distinct from both: Sah and Sopdet are named stars, while Sopdu is a god whose stellar identity rides on theirs. In the Pyramid Texts the dead king is identified with him as a brother of the Sun — Pepi II's ascent spells name "Sopdu under his mangroves" alongside the regional gods Iahes and Dedwen. The "sharp of teeth" wordplay on the spd root, the two-plumed falcon iconography, and the eastern-frontier cult at Per Sopdu all belong to him, not to Sah or Sopdet.

Historical Origin

Sopdu is attested in the Old Kingdom *Pyramid Texts*: the stellar genealogy (Osiris-Orion impregnating Isis-Sothis to produce Horus-Sopdu) and the "sharp of teeth" falcon-beak equation are cited to PT 201, and the eastern-frontier brother-of-the-Sun passages to Pepi II Spells 357 and 430 in James P. Allen, *The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts* (2005), pp. 266 and 281. His cult centred on Per Sopdu (modern Saft el-Henna) in the eastern Delta, with veneration at the Sinai outpost of Serabit el-Khadim, as surveyed in Richard H. Wilkinson, *The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt* (2003), p. 211.

Further Reading

• James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts
• Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt