The Seven Hathors of Karnak

This blog post has been written by Sandra Ottens, who has been working as a secretary at the municipality of Amsterdam for thirty years. Sandra studied Egyptology at Leiden University (BA and MA) from 2006 to 2012. She started blogging about her Egyptological adventures when her class attended a two-month study semester in Cairo, visiting a large number of excavation sites (https://egyptoblogie.wordpress.com). Sandra joined the excavations in Amheida (Dakhla Oasis) as an assistant epigrapher to Professor Olaf Kaper for one season in 2012. She wrote her MA thesis on the Seven Hathors, a group of seven goddesses who predicted the fate of newborn children. This blog post is about the Seven Hathors at Karnak, which is written here to coincide with the Egypt Centre’s short course on Karnak currently taking place.

 

Let me present to you what remains of the Seven Hathors in Karnak. This group is not depicted in the main temple of Karnak, but in the very small chapel J in the northeast corner of the complex. The chapel is usually referred to as the chapel of Osiris wp išd (fig. 1), because of a text that was discovered inside it. Redford (1986) has identified this chapel as the “temple of Isis of the Great Mound”, which was built by Hory, who was a priest of Amun around the time of Osorkon II (Twenty-second Dynasty) and Takelot II and Pedubast I (early Twenty-third Dynasty). Of this chapel only a few rows of blocks remain, and only a few pieces of relief, which are not in the best condition. But the very interesting thing is that one of these reliefs depicts the seven Hathors.

Fig. 1: The Osiris chapel

The Hathors were said to appear at the birth of a child in order to foretell its fate. In fairy tales, this fate could be either good or bad. In a temple context, the Hathors come to foretell the fate of a god or a king. In such cases, their predictions are always positive, because that fits into the ideology of the temple. They are accompanied by music, singing, and dancing.

The first Hathor is shown playing two sistra, and the ladies behind her, as far as they are still visible, are playing tambourines (fig. 2). There are a few captions left, which identify them as Hathors from different sanctuaries. The second lady is called Hathor, lady of Heracleopolis Magna, the fourth is called Hathor, lady of the Southern Sycomore, the fifth is called Hathor, lady of the Red Lake, and the sixth is called Hathor, lady of Es-Siririya. The names of the other ladies are lost.

Fig. 2: Detail of the first three Hathors

Before the Hathors stands a priest wearing a leopard skin and carrying a Horus falcon on a standard (fig. 3). Opposite this group is a baboon, of which only the lower half is visible, and behind the baboon, there is a male figure that is too damaged to be identified. This is where the piece of incised stone ends, but there seems to be enough space on the wall for there to have been another figure behind him. It is likely that the Hathors are playing their music for a god. Since the relief is in Karnak and the Hathors are usually associated with childbirth, a likely candidate would be Khonsu, the child of the Theban gods Amun and his wife Mut. Khonsu can sometimes be depicted as a baboon.

Fig. 3: Detail of the priest(s) before the first Hathor

According to Redford, this is the “temple of Isis of the Great Mound”, which was associated with the burial place of Osiris. In a text describing that building, it is called the msḫn.t (birthplace?) of Atum and the island of Re at the beginning, where Amun passes by (in procession) in his feast of the first of šmw, which appears to have had solar and Osirian connections. That may suggest a variety of other child gods. 

This little chapel, consisting of only two rooms, was excavated and restored in 1950. The 1951 publications by Chevrier and Leclant show photos of a reasonably well-preserved relief. Philippe Gossaert went to Karnak in 2012 and published some new photos on the web forum Per Kemet (which no longer exists). These show that one of the top blocks, showing the upper halves of the second, third, and fourth Hathor, is now missing. I went to Karnak in 2015 and the block was still missing (fig. 4). I took a walk around the chapel and had a good look at the blocks in the vicinity, but I couldn’t find anything like the block in the photos. Is it still somewhere in the Karnak precinct? If so, who moved it, and why?

Fig. 4: Annotated photo of the wall with the missing block in blue

Furthermore, at first glance, it seemed that the block to the right of it, with the remaining tops of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Hathor was now also missing. Then, to my relief, I noticed that this block was lying on the floor in front of the wall, upside down, and propped up on a couple of pieces of concrete (fig. 5). So it’s not exactly where it’s supposed to be, but at least it still exists. And who knows, at some point someone may take the trouble of restoring it to its place on the wall …

Fig. 5: The loose block with final Hathors

Bibliography:

Chevrier, Henri 1951. Rapport sur les travaux de Karnak 1950–1951. Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte 51, 549–572. [p. 554, pl. II.1]

Guglielmi, W. 1991. Die Göttin Mr.t: Entstehung und Verehrung einer Personifikation. Probleme der Ägyptologie 7. Leiden: Brill. [p. 95, n. 218]

Leclant, Jean 1951. Fouilles et travaux en Égypte, 1950–1951. I. Orientalia 20 (4), 453–475. [p. 463, pl. 53 (15)].

Porter, Bertha and Rosalind L. B. Moss 1972. Topographical bibliography of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, reliefs and paintings II: Theban temples, 2nd, augmented and revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Griffith Institute. [p. 204 (7). The depiction of the seven Hathors is not on wall 7 but on wall 6 of the plan in Porter & Moss]

Redford, Donald B. 1986. New light on Temple J at Karnak. Orientalia 55 (1), 1–15.

Rochholz, Matthias 2002. Schöpfung, Feindvernichtung, Regeneration: Untersuchung zum Symbolgehalt der machtgeladenen Zahl 7 im alten Ägypten. Ägypten und Altes Testament 56. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. [p. 72 (doc. 39)]