The Fierce Protector - The Lion-Goddess Sekhmet in Kom el-Hettan

Excavator Hourig Sourouzian and her team of archaeologists found some more statues of Sekhmet at Kom el-Hettan (click here for the press release).

Kom el-Hettan was built by Amenhotep III in the 14th century BC as his so-called "house of millions of years", a term often (mis-)translated as "mortuary temple" or "funerary temple". The temple precinct was surrounded by a 700 metres long and 550 metres wide wall that was eight and a half metres strong - it enclosed an area even bigger than the temple complex of Amun in Karnak (530 x 515 x 530 x 610 m, the temple precinct there is not rectangular).

The Colossi of Memnon at the entrance gate to the temple
of Amenhotep III in Western Thebes

The temple of Amenhotep III is situated on the West bank of the Nile opposite Luxor and is most famous and most recognizable for his two colossal statues of the seated king which flank the first of the four entrance gates to the temple. Each of them is 23 metres high. Countless other huge statues of the king were discovered in the temple area, two of which were found in fragments prior to 2014, but resurrected afterwards next to the temple of Merneptah where they can be visited today. 

The newly erected statues of Amenhotep III
next to the temple of Merneptah

The Sekhmet statues found this month were not the first discovered there either. The discovery of such artifacts in Kom el-Hettan often made the news - at least four times in the last three years (january and march 2013, february 2015 and again march 2016). In february 2015 the field director Hourig Sourouzian said that she and her team found 64 statues of the goddess Sekhmet until then. But many more exist: up to 600 statues are preserved today, but most of them are scattered around the world, e.g. fragments of 20 Sekhmet statues are kept at the British Museum London. It is said that there may have been 730 statues of Sekhmet in total at Kom el-Hettan, one seated and one standing for each day of the year, but this hypothesis hasn't been confirmed yet. It is also unclear why Amenhotep III placed so many statues of the goddess in his temple.

Sekhmet was very popular during the New Kingdom and later. She was venerated with her husband Ptah in his temple in Memphis, but this connections wasn't established prior to the 18th Dynasty. Unfortunately, earlier places of worship are hard to grasp. It is possible that Sekhmets cult originated in the Delta, near the town of Letopolis in the second nome of Lower Egypt, but archaeological evidence is still missing.

Bust of Sekhmet, ca. 1390-1352 B.C.
  found in the Temple of Mut in Karnak
(Inv.-Nr. 1991.311, CC-BY 3.0,
Original Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Sekhmets name means "the Mighty" or "Powerful one". She was depicted as a slender woman with the head of a lion and, oddly enough, often with the mane of such a male beast, although she was female. She is a very old goddess of the Egyptian pantheon who is already mentioned in the four millenia old Pyramid texts as the mother of the king (Pyr. 262). Her fiery and often brutal nature made her the perfect protector for the pharaoh, but also an embodiment of war. She accompanied the king in his battles against his enemies. She pierced their hearts with arrows or burned them in a blaze of fire. This rhetoric of a fire-breathing and arrow-shooting goddess was also used for another, more malign trait of Sekhmet, i.e. her ability to cause sickness and pestilence among the people. She either spread them herself or sent messengers to induce illness against mankind. For that she is feared, therefore many incantations, magic spells as well as healing texts and recipes invoked her aid against such afflictions.

Sekhmet was the daughter of the sun god Re since at least the New Kingdom. As such she is often referred to as the "Eye of Re" and wears a sun disk on her head as a symbol for her connection to this god and the burning nature of the sun. As his daughter she did his bidding in the myth of the destruction of mankind in which humanity is almost wiped out for their sinful behavior and rebellion against the sun god. 


Sources:
H. Gauthier, Les statues Thébaines de la déesse Sakhmet, in: ASAE 19 (1919) pp. 177-203
G. Haeny, Untersuchungen im Totentempel Amenophis' III., BeiträgeBf 11 (Wiesbaden 1981).
M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature II. The New Kingdom (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 2006) pp. 197-199.
H. Sternberg, Sachmet, in: LÄ V, Sp. 323-333.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Wizards of Ancient Egypt

The Sorcerer's Apprentice was on the telly a few days ago. The movie from 2010 is a very loosely based on Goethe’s poem of the same name written in 1797. Nicolas Cage plays the centuries old magician Balthazar Blake who tries to save the world from the mad sorceress Morgana le Fay. She plans to raise an army of dead wizards to destroy the world. A mysterious ritual is required to resurrect her evil followers around the world, from Paris to ancient Egypt. A dark cloud rages over the planet to the myriad graves of Morganas disciples. When the cloud arrives in Egypt the correspondent scene shows the facade of a tomb at the Giza plateau, southeast of the great pyramid of pharaoh Khufu.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice (c) Walt Disney Pictures

The entrance to Seshem-nefers tomb

It is the entrance to the mastaba of a man named Seshem-nefer IV. He was an official during the late fifth or early sixth dynasty – his titles included director of the two thrones in the Mansion of Life, secretary of all secret commands of the king and chief of the goddess Bat.The walls inside the tomb are decorated with representations of the tomb owner, his family and household staff as well as hunting and harvesting and other daily life scenes. Some of these reliefs are now displayed in the Roemer- and Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, Germany. 

But Seshem-nefer was no wizard.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice (c) Walt Disney Pictures

The next shot shows a statue of a seated man in front of columns and mummy-shaped pillars. The dark cloud reaches it and is drawn in. The statue is evidently a representation of a famous and powerful ancient sorcerer.

The Ramesseum in Thebes

Like the mastaba in the first shot the location of the statue is also a real place in Egypt. It is the eastern facade in the first court of the Ramesseum, a temple in western Thebes. This temple was built in the 13th century BC as the house of millions of years of pharaoh Ramesses II. Visitors to the temple will seek this statue in vain though, because it is not real. There are many statues in the temple, but this one doesn’t belong to the building's furniture and was added digitally during the movie's post-production. 


But which one of the age-old wizards of pharaonic Egypt could this statue represent? 

There aren't many names preserved in the ancient record, but one of the cardinal sources for fabled magicians is the papyrus Westcar. This papyrus scroll is more than 3500 years old and is now on display in the Egyptian Museum Berlin. The text contains five tales about a number of powerful wizards and their magical deeds. Most of these tales are told to pharaoh Khufu by his sons. 

The protagonist of one of them is the priest and sorcerer Ubaoner. His name means "the one who splits stones". He is betrayed by his wife who is unfaithful to him. She has an affair with a lesser man and often meets him in a summer house in the middle of a pond. The sorcerer Ubaoner realizes their foul play and plots revenge. He forms a seven fingers long crocodile of wax and casts a spell over it. When his wife is visited again by her lover she is waiting for him on an island in the pond. So he has to swim there. As soon as the man gets into the water Ubaoner throws the crocodile into it and the figurine grows to the full size of seven cubits (almost four metres). The now tremendous beast catches the adulterer and drags him to the ground of the lake. He is never seen again and no one knows where the beast might have brought him. Ubaoners wife on the other hand was taken to the region north of the royal residence. There she was burnt and her ashes were scattered over the river, an incredible cruel fate that deprives her of the chance to live and prosper in the nether regions. 

So Ubaoner was clearly a powerful and maybe gruesome mage, but was he evil enough to qualify as one of Morganas disciples? Probably not, but who knows? ;-) 

Sources:
M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian literature: a book of readings. The Old and Middle Kingdoms I (University of California Press 2000) S. 215–220;
A. M. Blackman, The story of King Kheops and the magicians : transcribed from Papyrus Westcar (Berlin Papyrus 3033) (Reading 1988)