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Hathor

Hathor (ḥwt-ḥr, Ἁθώρ, ϩⲁⲑⲱⲣ, Meroitic: ) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, both of whom were connected with kingship, and thus she was the symbolic mother of their earthly representatives, the pharaohs. She was one of several goddesses who acted as the Eye of Ra, Ra's feminine counterpart, and in this form, she had a vengeful aspect that protected him from his enemies. Her beneficent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and the mother of their sons. These two aspects of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife.

Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspect, although her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk. She could also be represented as a lioness, a cobra, or a sycamore tree.

Cattle goddesses similar to Hathor were portrayed in Egyptian art in the fourth millennium BC, but she may not have appeared until the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC). With the patronage of Old Kingdom rulers, she became one of Egypt's most important deities. More temples were dedicated to her than to any other goddess; her most prominent temple was Dendera in Upper Egypt. She was also worshipped in the temples of her male consorts. The Egyptians connected her with foreign lands, such as Nubia and Canaan, and their valuable goods, such as incense and semiprecious stones, and some of the peoples in those lands adopted her worship. In Egypt, she was one of the deities commonly invoked in private prayers and votive offerings, particularly by women desiring children.

During the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC), goddesses such as Mut and Isis encroached on Hathor's position in royal ideology, but she remained one of the most widely worshipped deities. After the end of the New Kingdom, Hathor was increasingly overshadowed by Isis, but she continued to be venerated until the extinction of ancient Egyptian religion in the early centuries AD.

Origins

Images of cattle appear frequently in the artwork of Predynastic Egypt (before c. 3100 BC), as do images of women with upraised, curved arms, reminiscent of the shape of bovine horns. Both types of imagery may represent goddesses connected with cattle. Cows are venerated in many cultures, including ancient Egypt, as symbols of motherhood and nourishment, because they care for their calves and provide humans with milk. The Gerzeh Palette, a stone palette from the Naqada II period of prehistory (c. 3500–3200 BC), shows the silhouette of a cow's head with inward-curving horns surrounded by stars. The palette suggests that this cow was also linked with the sky, as were several goddesses from later times who were represented in this form: Hathor, Mehet-Weret, and Nut.

Despite these earlier precedents, Hathor is not unambiguously mentioned or depicted until the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2613–2494 BC) of the Old Kingdom, although several artifacts that refer to her may date to the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100–2686 BC). When Hathor does clearly appear, her horns curve outward, rather than inward like those in Predynastic art.

A bovine deity with inward-curving horns appears on the Narmer Palette from near the start of Egyptian history, both atop the palette and on the belt or apron of the king, Narmer. The Egyptologist Henry George Fischer suggested this deity may be Bat, a goddess who was later depicted with a woman's face and inward-curling horns, seemingly reflecting the curve of the cow horns. The Egyptologist Lana Troy, however, identifies a passage in the Pyramid Texts from the late Old Kingdom that connects Hathor with the "apron" of the king, reminiscent of the goddess on Narmer's garments, and suggests the goddess on the Narmer Palette is Hathor rather than Bat.

In the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor rose rapidly to prominence. She supplanted an early crocodile god who was worshipped at Dendera in Upper Egypt to become Dendera's patron deity, and she increasingly absorbed the cult of Bat in the neighboring region of Hu, so that in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC) the two deities fused into one. The theology surrounding the pharaoh in the Old Kingdom, unlike that of earlier times, focused heavily on the sun god Ra as king of the gods and father and patron of the earthly king. Hathor ascended with Ra and became his mythological wife, and thus divine mother of the pharaoh.

Roles
Hathor took many forms and appeared in a wide variety of roles. The Egyptologist Robyn Gillam suggests that these diverse forms emerged when the royal goddess promoted by the Old Kingdom court subsumed many local goddesses worshipped by the general populace, who were then treated as manifestations of her. Egyptian texts often speak of the manifestations of the goddess as "Seven Hathors" or, less commonly, of many more Hathors—as many as 362. For these reasons, Gillam calls her "a type of deity rather than a single entity". Hathor's diversity reflects the range of traits that the Egyptians associated with goddesses. More than any other deity, she exemplifies the Egyptian perception of femininity.

Sky goddess
Hathor was given the epithets "mistress of the sky" and "mistress of the stars", and was said to dwell in the sky with Ra and other sun deities. Egyptians thought of the sky as a body of water through which the sun god sailed, and they connected it with the waters from which, according to their creation myths, the sun emerged at the beginning of time. This cosmic mother goddess was often represented as a cow. Hathor and Mehet-Weret were both thought of as the cow who birthed the sun god and placed him between her horns. Like Nut, Hathor was said to give birth to the sun god each dawn.

Hathor's Egyptian name was ḥwt-ḥrw or ḥwt-ḥr. It is typically translated "house of Horus" but can also be rendered as "my house is the sky". The falcon god Horus represented, among other things, the sun and sky. The "house" referred to may be the sky in which Horus lives, or the goddess's womb from which he, as a sun god, is born each day.

Solar goddess
Hathor was a solar deity, a feminine counterpart to sun gods such as Horus and Ra, and was a member of the divine entourage that accompanied Ra as he sailed through the sky in his barque. She was commonly called the "Golden One", referring to the radiance of the sun, and texts from her temple at Dendera say "her rays illuminate the whole earth." She was sometimes fused with another goddess, Nebethetepet, whose name can mean "Lady of the Offering", "Lady of Contentment", or "Lady of the Vulva". At Ra's cult center of Heliopolis, Hathor-Nebethetepet was worshipped as his consort, and the Egyptologist Rudolf Anthes argued that Hathor's name referred to a mythical "house of Horus" at Heliopolis that was connected with the ideology of kingship.

She was one of many goddesses to take the role of the Eye of Ra, a feminine personification of the disk of the sun and an extension of Ra's own power. Ra was sometimes portrayed inside the disk, which Troy interprets as meaning that the eye goddess was thought of as a womb, from which the sun god was born. Hathor's seemingly contradictory roles as mother, wife, and daughter of Ra reflected the daily cycle of the sun. At sunset the god entered the body of the sky goddess, impregnating her and fathering the deities born from her womb at sunrise: himself and the eye goddess, who would later give birth to him. Ra gave rise to his daughter, the eye goddess, who in turn gave rise to him, her son, in a cycle of constant regeneration.

The Eye of Ra protected the sun god from his enemies and was often represented as a uraeus, or rearing cobra, or as a lioness. A form of the Eye of Ra known as "Hathor of the Four Faces", represented by a set of four cobras, was said to face in each of the cardinal directions to watch for threats to the sun god. A group of myths, known from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) onward, describe what happens when the Eye goddess rampages uncontrolled. In the funerary text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra sends Hathor as the Eye of Ra to punish humans for plotting rebellion against his rule. She becomes the lioness goddess Sekhmet and massacres the rebellious humans, but Ra decides to prevent her from killing all humanity. He orders that beer be dyed red and poured out over the land. The Eye goddess drinks the beer, mistaking it for blood, and in her inebriated state reverts to being the benign and beautiful Hathor. Related to this story is the myth of the Distant Goddess, from the Late and Ptolemaic periods. The Eye goddess, sometimes in the form of Hathor, rebels against Ra's control and rampages freely in a foreign land: Libya west of Egypt or Nubia to the south. Weakened by the loss of his Eye, Ra sends another god, such as Thoth, to bring her back to him. Once pacified, the goddess returns to become the consort of the sun god or of the god who brings her back. The two aspects of the Eye goddess—violent and dangerous versus beautiful and joyful—reflected the Egyptian belief that women, as the Egyptologist Carolyn Graves-Brown puts it, "encompassed both extreme passions of fury and love".

Music, dance, and joy

Egyptian religion celebrated the sensory pleasures of life, believed to be among the gods' gifts to humanity. Egyptians ate, drank, danced, and played music at their religious festivals. They perfumed the air with flowers and incense. Many of Hathor's epithets link her to celebration; she is called the mistress of music, dance, garlands, myrrh, and drunkenness. In hymns and temple reliefs, musicians play tambourines, harps, lyres, and sistra in Hathor's honor. The sistrum, a rattle-like instrument, was particularly important in Hathor's worship. Sistra had erotic connotations and, by extension, alluded to the creation of new life.

These aspects of Hathor were linked with the myth of the Eye of Ra. The Eye was pacified by beer in the story of the Destruction of Mankind. In some versions of the Distant Goddess myth, the wandering Eye's wildness abated when she was appeased with products of civilization like music, dance, and wine. The water of the annual flooding of the Nile, colored red by sediment, was likened to wine, and to the red-dyed beer in the Destruction of Mankind. Festivals during the inundation therefore incorporated drink, music, and dance as a way to appease the returning goddess. A text from the Temple of Edfu says of Hathor, "the gods play the sistrum for her, the goddesses dance for her to dispel her bad temper." A hymn to the goddess Raet-Tawy as a form of Hathor at the temple of Medamud describes the Festival of Drunkenness (Tekh Festival) as part of her mythic return to Egypt. Women carry bouquets of flowers, drunken revelers play drums, and people and animals from foreign lands dance for her as she enters the temple's festival booth. The noise of the celebration drives away hostile powers and ensures the goddess will remain in her joyful form as she awaits the male god of the temple, her mythological consort Montu, whose son she will bear.

Sexuality, beauty, and love
Hathor's joyful, ecstatic side indicates her feminine, procreative power. In some creation myths she helped produce the world itself. Atum, a creator god who contained all things within himself, was said to have produced his children Shu and Tefnut, and thus begun the process of creation, by masturbating. The hand he used for this act, the Hand of Atum, represented the female aspect of himself and could be personified by Hathor, Nebethetepet, or another goddess, Iusaaset. In a late creation myth from the Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BC), the god Khonsu is put in a central role, and Hathor is the goddess with whom Khonsu mates to enable creation.

Hathor could be the consort of many male gods, of whom Ra was only the most prominent. Mut was the usual consort of Amun, the preeminent deity during the New Kingdom who was often linked with Ra. But Mut was rarely portrayed alongside Amun in contexts related to sex or fertility, and in those circumstances, Hathor or Isis stood at his side instead. In the late periods of Egyptian history, the form of Hathor from Dendera and the form of Horus from Edfu were considered husband and wife and in different versions of the myth of the Distant Goddess, Hathor-Raettawy was the consort of Montu and Hathor-Tefnut the consort of Shu.

Hathor's sexual side was seen in some short stories. In a cryptic fragment of a Middle Kingdom story, known as "The Tale of the Herdsman", a herdsman encounters a hairy, animal-like goddess in a marsh and reacts with terror. On another day he encounters her as a nude, alluring woman. Most Egyptologists who study this story think this woman is Hathor or a goddess like her, one who can be wild and dangerous or benign and erotic. Thomas Schneider interprets the text as implying that between his two encounters with the goddess the herdsman has done something to pacify her. In "The Contendings of Horus and Set", a New Kingdom short story about the dispute between those two gods, Ra is upset after being insulted by another god, Babi, and lies on his back alone. After some time, Hathor exposes her genitals to Ra, making him laugh and get up again to perform his duties as ruler of the gods. Life and order were thought to be dependent on Ra's activity, and the story implies that Hathor averted the disastrous consequences of his idleness. Her act may have lifted Ra's spirits partly because it sexually aroused him, although why he laughed is not fully understood.

Hathor was praised for her beautiful hair. Egyptian literature contains allusions to a myth not clearly described in any surviving texts, in which Hathor lost a lock of hair that represented her sexual allure. One text compares this loss with Horus's loss of his divine Eye and Set's loss of his testicles during the struggle between the two gods, implying that the loss of Hathor's lock was as catastrophic for her as the maiming of Horus and Set was for them.

Hathor was called "mistress of love", as an extension of her sexual aspect. In the series of love poems from Papyrus Chester BeattyI, from the Twentieth Dynasty (c. 1189–1077 BC), men and women ask Hathor to bring their lovers to them: "I prayed to her [Hathor] and she heard my prayer. She destined my mistress [loved one] for me. And she came of her own free will to see me."

Motherhood and queenship
Hathor was considered the mother of various child deities. As suggested by her name, she was often thought of as both Horus's mother and consort. As both the king's wife and his heir's mother, Hathor was the divine counterpart of human queens.

Isis and Osiris were considered Horus's parents in the Osiris myth as far back as the late Old Kingdom, but the relationship between Horus and Hathor may be older still. If so, Horus only came to be linked with Isis and Osiris as the Osiris myth emerged during the Old Kingdom. Even after Isis was firmly established as Horus's mother, Hathor continued to appear in this role, especially when nursing the pharaoh. Images of the Hathor-cow with a child in a papyrus thicket represented his mythological upbringing in a secluded marsh. Goddesses' milk was a sign of divinity and royal status. Thus, images in which Hathor nurses the pharaoh represent his right to rule. Hathor's relationship with Horus gave a healing aspect to her character, as she was said to have restored Horus's missing eye or eyes after Set attacked him. In the version of this episode in "The Contendings of Horus and Set", Hathor finds Horus with his eyes torn out and heals the wounds with gazelle's milk.

Beginning in the Late Period (664–323 BC), temples focused on the worship of a divine family: an adult male deity, his wife, and their immature son. Satellite buildings, known as mammisis, were built in celebration of the birth of the local child deity. The child god represented the cyclical renewal of the cosmos and an archetypal heir to the kingship. Hathor was the mother in many of these local divine triads. At Dendera, the mature Horus of Edfu was the father and Hathor the mother, while their child was Ihy, a god whose name meant "sistrum-player" and who personified the jubilation associated with the instrument. At Kom Ombo, Hathor's local form, Tasenetnofret, was mother to Horus's son Panebtawy. Other children of Hathor included a minor deity from the town of Hu, named Neferhotep, and several child forms of Horus.

The milky sap of the sycamore tree, which the Egyptians regarded as a symbol of life, became one of her symbols. The milk was equated with water of the Nile inundation and thus fertility. In the late Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, many temples contained a creation myth that adapted long-standing ideas about creation. The version from Hathor's temple at Dendera emphasizes that she, as a female solar deity, was the first being to emerge from the primordial waters that preceded creation, and her life-giving light and milk nourished all living things.

Hathor's maternal aspects can be compared with those of Isis and Mut, yet there are many contrasts between them. Isis's devotion to her husband and care for their child represented a more socially acceptable form of love than Hathor's uninhibited sexuality, and Mut's character was more authoritative than sexual. The text of the 1st century CE Insinger Papyrus likens a faithful wife, the mistress of a household, to Mut, while comparing Hathor to a strange woman who tempts a married man.

Fate
Like Meskhenet, another goddess who presided over birth, Hathor was connected with shai, the Egyptian concept of fate, particularly when she took the form of the Seven Hathors. In two New Kingdom works of fiction, the "Tale of Two Brothers" and the "Tale of the Doomed Prince", the Hathors appear at the births of major characters and foretell the manner of their deaths. The Egyptians tended to think of fate as inexorable. Yet in "The Tale of the Doomed Prince", the prince who is its protagonist is able to escape one of the possible violent deaths that the Seven Hathors have foretold for him, and while the end of the story is missing, the surviving portions imply that the prince can escape his fate with the help of the gods.

Foreign lands and goods
Hathor was connected with trade and foreign lands, possibly because her role as a sky goddess linked her with stars and hence navigation, and because she was believed to protect ships on the Nile and in the seas beyond Egypt as she protected the barque of Ra in the sky. The mythological wandering of the Eye goddess in Nubia or Libya gave her a connection with those lands as well.

Egypt maintained trade relations with the coastal cities of Syria and Canaan, particularly Byblos, placing Egyptian religion in contact with the religions of that region. At some point, perhaps as early as the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians began to refer to the patron goddess of Byblos, Baalat Gebal, as a local form of Hathor. So strong was Hathor's link to Byblos that texts from Dendera say she resided there. The Egyptians sometimes equated Anat, an aggressive Canaanite goddess who came to be worshipped in Egypt during the New Kingdom, with Hathor. Some Canaanite artworks depict a nude goddess with a curling wig taken from Hathor's iconography. Which goddess these images represent is not known, but the Egyptians adopted her iconography and came to regard her as an independent deity, Qetesh, whom they associated with Hathor.

Hathor was closely connected with the Sinai Peninsula, which was not considered part of Egypt proper but was the site of Egyptian mines for copper, turquoise, and malachite during the Middle and New Kingdoms. One of Hathor's epithets, "Lady of Mefkat", may have referred specifically to turquoise or to all blue-green minerals. She was also called "Lady of Faience", a blue-green ceramic that Egyptians likened to turquoise. Hathor was also worshipped at various quarries and mining sites in Egypt's Eastern Desert, such as the amethyst mines of Wadi el-Hudi, where she was sometimes called "Lady of Amethyst".

South of Egypt, Hathor's influence was thought to have extended over the land of Punt, which lay along the Red Sea coast and was a major source for the incense with which Hathor was linked, as well as with Nubia, northwest of Punt. The autobiography of Harkhuf, an official in the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2345–2181 BC), describes his expedition to a land in or near Nubia, from which he brought back great quantities of ebony, panther skins, and incense for the king. The text describes these exotic goods as Hathor's gift to the pharaoh. Egyptian expeditions to mine gold in Nubia introduced her cult to the region during the Middle and New Kingdoms, and New Kingdom pharaohs built several temples to her in the portions of Nubia that they ruled.

Afterlife

Although the Pyramid Texts, the earliest Egyptian funerary texts, rarely mention her, Hathor was invoked in private tomb inscriptions from the same era, and in the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts and later sources, she is frequently linked with the afterlife.

Just as she crossed the boundary between Egypt and foreign lands, Hathor passed through the boundary between the living and the Duat, the realm of the dead. She helped the spirits of deceased humans enter the Duat and was closely linked with tomb sites, where that transition began. The necropolises, or clusters of tombs, on the west bank of the Nile were personified as Imentet, the goddess of the west, who was frequently regarded as a manifestation of Hathor. The Theban necropolis, for example, was often portrayed as a stylized mountain with the cow of Hathor emerging from it. Her role as a sky goddess was also linked to the afterlife. Because the sky goddess—either Nut or Hathor—assisted Ra in his daily rebirth, she had an important part in ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs, according to which deceased humans were reborn like the sun god. Coffins, tombs, and the underworld itself were interpreted as the womb of this goddess, from which the deceased soul would be reborn.

Nut, Hathor, and Imentet could each, in different texts, lead the deceased into a place where they would receive food and drink for eternal sustenance. Thus, Hathor, as Imentet, often appears on tombs, welcoming the deceased person as her child into a blissful afterlife. In New Kingdom funerary texts and artwork, the afterlife was often illustrated as a pleasant, fertile garden, over which Hathor sometimes presided. The welcoming afterlife goddess was often portrayed as a goddess in the form of a tree, giving water to the deceased. Nut most commonly filled this role, but the tree goddess was sometimes called Hathor instead.

The afterlife also had a sexual aspect. In the Osiris myth, the murdered god Osiris was resurrected when he copulated with Isis and conceived Horus. In solar ideology, Ra's union with the sky goddess allowed his own rebirth. Sex therefore enabled the rebirth of the deceased, and goddesses like Isis and Hathor served to rouse the deceased to new life. But they merely stimulated the male deities' regenerative powers, rather than playing the central role.

Ancient Egyptians prefixed the names of the deceased with Osiris's name to connect them with his resurrection. For example, a woman named Henutmehyt would be dubbed "Osiris-Henutmehyt". Over time they increasingly associated the deceased with both male and female divine powers. As early as the late Old Kingdom, women were sometimes said to join the worshippers of Hathor in the afterlife, just as men joined the following of Osiris. In the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070–664 BC), Egyptians began to add Hathor's name to that of deceased women in place of that of Osiris. In some cases, women were called "Osiris-Hathor", indicating that they benefited from the revivifying power of both deities. In these late periods, Hathor was sometimes said to rule the afterlife as Osiris did.

Iconography
Hathor was often depicted as a cow bearing the sun disk between her horns, especially when shown nursing the king. She could also appear as a woman with the head of a cow. Her most common form, however, was a woman wearing a headdress of the horns and sun disk, often with a red or turquoise sheath dress, or a dress combining both colors. Sometimes the horns stood atop a low modius or the vulture headdress that Egyptian queens often wore in the New Kingdom. Because Isis adopted the same headdress during the New Kingdom, the two goddesses can be distinguished only if labeled in writing. When in the role of Imentet, Hathor wore the emblem of the west upon her head instead of the horned headdress. The Seven Hathors were sometimes portrayed as a set of seven cows, accompanied by a minor sky and afterlife deity called the Bull of the West.

Some animals other than cattle could represent Hathor. The uraeus was a common motif in Egyptian art and could represent a variety of goddesses who were identified with the Eye of Ra. When Hathor was depicted as a uraeus, it represented the ferocious and protective aspects of her character. She also appeared as a lioness, and this form had a similar meaning. In contrast, the domestic cat, which was sometimes connected with Hathor, often represented the Eye goddess's pacified form. When portrayed as a sycamore tree, Hathor was usually shown with the upper body of her human form emerging from the trunk.

Like other goddesses, Hathor might carry a stalk of papyrus as a staff, though she could instead hold a was staff, a symbol of power that was usually restricted to male deities. The only goddesses who used the was were those, like Hathor, who were linked with the Eye of Ra. She also commonly carried a sistrum or a menat necklace. The sistrum came in two varieties: a simple loop shape or the more complex naos sistrum, which was shaped to resemble a naos shrine and flanked by volutes resembling the antennae of the Bat emblem. Mirrors were another of her symbols, because in Egypt they were often made of gold or bronze and therefore symbolized the sun disk, and because they were connected with beauty and femininity. Some mirror handles were made in the shape of Hathor's face. The menat necklace, made up of many strands of beads, was shaken in ceremonies in Hathor's honor, similarly to the sistrum. Images of it were sometimes seen as personifications of Hathor herself.

Hathor was sometimes represented as a human face with bovine ears, seen from the front rather than in the profile-based perspective that was typical of Egyptian art. When she appears in this form, the tresses on either side of her face often curl into loops. This mask-like face was placed on the capitals of columns beginning in the late Old Kingdom. Columns of this style were used in many temples to Hathor and other goddesses. These columns have two or four faces, which may represent the duality between different aspects of the goddess or the watchfulness of Hathor of the Four Faces. The designs of Hathoric columns have a complex relationship with those of sistra. Both styles of sistrum can bear the Hathor mask on the handle, and Hathoric columns often incorporate the naos sistrum shape above the goddess's head.

Relationship with royalty
During the Early Dynastic Period, Neith was the preeminent goddess at the royal court, while in the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor became the goddess most closely linked with the king. Sneferu, the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, may have built a temple to her, and Neferhetepes, a daughter of Djedefra, was the first recorded priestess of Hathor. Old Kingdom rulers donated resources only to temples dedicated to particular kings or to deities closely connected with kingship. Hathor was one of the few deities to receive such donations. Late Old Kingdom rulers especially promoted the cult of Hathor in the provinces, as a way of binding those regions to the royal court. She may have absorbed the traits of contemporary provincial goddesses.

Many female royals, though not reigning queens, held positions in the cult during the Old Kingdom. Mentuhotep II, who became the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom despite having no relation to the Old Kingdom rulers, sought to legitimize his rule by portraying himself as Hathor's son. The first images of the Hathor-cow suckling the king date to his reign, and several priestesses of Hathor were depicted as though they were his wives, although he may not have actually married them. In the course of the Middle Kingdom, queens were increasingly seen as directly embodying the goddess, just as the king embodied Ra. The emphasis on the queen as Hathor continued through the New Kingdom. Queens were portrayed with the headdress of Hathor beginning in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. An image of the sed festival of Amenhotep III, meant to celebrate and renew his rule, shows the king together with Hathor and his queen Tiye, which could mean that the king symbolically married the goddess in the course of the festival.

Hatshepsut, a woman who ruled as a pharaoh in the early New Kingdom, emphasized her relationship to Hathor in a different way. She used names and titles that linked her to a variety of goddesses, including Hathor, so as to legitimize her rule in what was normally a male position. She built several temples to Hathor and placed her own mortuary temple, which incorporated a chapel dedicated to the goddess, at Deir el-Bahari, which had been a cult site of Hathor since the Middle Kingdom.

The preeminence of Amun during the New Kingdom gave greater visibility to his consort Mut, and in the course of the period, Isis began appearing in roles that traditionally belonged to Hathor alone, such as that of the goddess in the solar barque. Despite the growing prominence of these deities, Hathor remained important, particularly in relation to fertility, sexuality, and queenship, throughout the New Kingdom.

After the New Kingdom, Isis increasingly overshadowed Hathor and other goddesses as she took on their characteristics. In the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BC), when Greeks governed Egypt and their religion developed a complex relationship with that of Egypt, the Ptolemaic dynasty adopted and modified the Egyptian ideology of kingship. Beginning with Arsinoe II, wife of Ptolemy II, the Ptolemies closely linked their queens with Isis and with several Greek goddesses, particularly their own goddess of love and sexuality, Aphrodite. Nevertheless, when the Greeks referred to Egyptian gods by the names of their own gods (a practice called interpretatio graeca), they sometimes called Hathor Aphrodite. Traits of Isis, Hathor, and Aphrodite were all combined to justify the treatment of Ptolemaic queens as goddesses. Thus, the poet Callimachus alluded to the myth of Hathor's lost lock of hair in the Aetia when praising Berenice II for sacrificing her own hair to Aphrodite, and iconographic traits that Isis and Hathor shared, such as the bovine horns and vulture headdress, appeared on images portraying Ptolemaic queens as Aphrodite.

Temples in Egypt

More temples were dedicated to Hathor than to any other Egyptian goddess. During the Old Kingdom her most important center of worship was in the region of Memphis, where "Hathor of the Sycamore" was worshipped at many sites throughout the Memphite Necropolis. During the New Kingdom era, the temple of Hathor of the Southern Sycamore was her main temple in Memphis. At that site she was described as the daughter of the city's main deity, Ptah. The cult of Ra and Atum at Heliopolis, northeast of Memphis, included a temple to Hathor-Nebethetepet that was probably built in the Middle Kingdom. A willow and a sycamore tree stood near the sanctuary and may have been worshipped as manifestations of the goddess. A few cities farther north in the Nile Delta, such as Yamu and Terenuthis, also had temples to her.

Dendera, Hathor's oldest temple in Upper Egypt, dates to at least to the Fourth Dynasty. After the end of the Old Kingdom it surpassed her Memphite temples in importance. Many kings made additions to the temple complex through Egyptian history. The last version of the temple was built in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and is today one of the best-preserved Egyptian temples from that time.

As the rulers of the Old Kingdom made an effort to develop towns in Upper and Middle Egypt, several cult centers of Hathor were founded across the region, at sites such as Cusae, Akhmim, and Naga ed-Der. In the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181–2055 BC) her cult statue from Dendera was periodically carried to the Theban necropolis. During the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, MentuhotepII established a permanent cult center for her in the necropolis at Deir el-Bahari. The nearby village of Deir el-Medina, home to the tomb workers of the necropolis during the New Kingdom, also contained temples of Hathor. One continued to function and was periodically rebuilt as late as the Ptolemaic Period, centuries after the village was abandoned.

In the Old Kingdom, most priests of Hathor, including the highest ranks, were women. Many of these women were members of the royal family. In the course of the Middle Kingdom, women were increasingly excluded from the highest priestly positions, at the same time that queens were becoming more closely tied to Hathor's cult. Thus, non-royal women disappeared from the high ranks of Hathor's priesthood, although women continued to serve as musicians and singers in temple cults across Egypt.

The most frequent temple rite for any deity was the daily offering ritual, in which the cult image, or statue, of a deity would be clothed and given food. The daily ritual was largely the same in every Egyptian temple, although the goods given as offerings could vary according to which deity received them. Wine and beer were common offerings in all temples, but especially in rituals in Hathor's honor, and she and the goddesses related to her often received sistra and menat necklaces. In Late and Ptolemaic times, they were also offered a pair of mirrors, representing the sun and the moon.

Festivals
Many of Hathor's annual festivals were celebrated with drinking and dancing that served a ritual purpose. Revelers at these festivals may have aimed to reach a state of religious ecstasy, which was otherwise rare or nonexistent in ancient Egyptian religion. Graves-Brown suggests that celebrants in Hathor's festivals aimed to reach an altered state of consciousness to allow them interact with the divine realm. An example is the Festival of Drunkenness, commemorating the return of the Eye of Ra, which was celebrated on the twentieth day of the month of Thout at temples to Hathor and to other Eye goddesses. It was celebrated as early as the Middle Kingdom, but it is best known from Ptolemaic and Roman times. The dancing, eating and drinking that took place during the Festival of Drunkenness represented the opposite of the sorrow, hunger, and thirst that the Egyptians associated with death. Whereas the rampages of the Eye of Ra brought death to humans, the Festival of Drunkenness celebrated life, abundance, and joy.

In a local Theban festival known as the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, which began to be celebrated in the Middle Kingdom, the cult image of Amun from the Temple of Karnak visited the temples in the Theban Necropolis while members of the community went to the tombs of their deceased relatives to drink, eat, and celebrate. Hathor was not involved in this festival until the early New Kingdom, after which Amun's overnight stay in the temples at Deir el-Bahari came to be seen as his sexual union with her.

Several temples in Ptolemaic times, including that of Dendera, observed the Egyptian new year with a series of ceremonies in which images of the temple deity were supposed to be revitalized by contact with the sun god. On the days leading up to the new year, Dendera's statue of Hathor was taken to the wabet, a specialized room in the temple, and placed under a ceiling decorated with images of the sky and sun. On the first day of the new year, the first day of the month of Thoth, the Hathor image was carried up to the roof to be bathed in genuine sunlight.

The best-documented festival focused on Hathor is another Ptolemaic celebration, the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion. It took place over fourteen days in the month of Epiphi. Hathor's cult image from Dendera was carried by boat to several temple sites to visit the gods of those temples. The endpoint of the journey was the Temple of Horus at Edfu, where the Hathor statue from Dendera met that of Horus of Edfu and the two were placed together. On one day of the festival, these images were carried out to a shrine where primordial deities such as the sun god and the Ennead were said to be buried. The texts say the divine couple performed offering rites for these entombed gods. Many Egyptologists regard this festival as a ritual marriage between Horus and Hathor, although Martin Stadler challenges this view, arguing that it instead represented the rejuvenation of the buried creator gods. C. J. Bleeker thought the Beautiful Reunion was another celebration of the return of the Distant Goddess, citing allusions in the temple's festival texts to the myth of the solar eye. Barbara Richter argues that the festival represented all three things at once. She points out that the birth of Horus and Hathor's son Ihy was celebrated at Dendera nine months after the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, implying that Hathor's visit to Horus represented Ihy's conception.

The third month of the Egyptian calendar, Hathor or Athyr, was named for the goddess. Festivities in her honor took place throughout the month, although they are not recorded in the texts from Dendera.

Worship outside Egypt

Egyptian kings as early as the Old Kingdom donated goods to the temple of Baalat Gebal in Byblos, using the syncretism of Baalat with Hathor to cement their close trading relationship with Byblos. A temple to Hathor as Lady of Byblos was built during the reign of Thutmose III, although it may simply have been a shrine within the temple of Baalat. After the breakdown of the New Kingdom, Hathor's prominence in Byblos diminished along with Egypt's trade links to the city. A few artifacts from the early first millennium BC suggest that the Egyptians began equating Baalat with Isis at that time. A myth about Isis's presence in Byblos, related by the Greek author Plutarch in his work On Isis and Osiris in the 2nd century AD, suggests that by his time Isis had entirely supplanted Hathor in the city.

A pendant found in a Mycenaean tomb at Pylos, from the 16th century BC, bears Hathor's face. Its presence in the tomb suggests the Mycenaeans may have known that the Egyptians connected Hathor with the afterlife.

Egyptians in the Sinai Peninsula built a few temples in the region. The largest was a complex dedicated primarily to Hathor as patroness of mining at Serabit el-Khadim, on the west side of the peninsula. It was occupied from the middle of the Middle Kingdom to near the end of the New. The Timna Valley, on the fringes of the Egyptian empire on the east side of the peninsula, was the site of seasonal mining expeditions during the New Kingdom. It included a shrine to Hathor that was probably deserted during the off-season. The local Midianites, whom the Egyptians used as part of the mining workforce, may have given offerings to Hathor as their overseers did. After the Egyptians abandoned the site in the Twentieth Dynasty, however, the Midianites converted the shrine to a tent shrine devoted to their own deities.

In contrast, the Nubians in the south fully incorporated Hathor into their religion. During the New Kingdom, when most of Nubia was under Egyptian control, pharaohs dedicated several temples in Nubia to Hathor, such as those at Faras and Mirgissa. AmenhotepIII and Ramesses II both built temples in Nubia that celebrated their respective queens as manifestations of female deities, including Hathor: Amenhotep's wife Tiye at Sedeinga and Ramesses's wife Nefertari at the Small Temple of Abu Simbel. The independent Kingdom of Kush, which emerged in Nubia after the collapse of the New Kingdom, based its beliefs about Kushite kings on the royal ideology of Egypt. Therefore, Hathor, Isis, Mut, and Nut were all seen as the mythological mother of each Kushite king and equated with his female relatives, such as the kandake, the Kushite queen or queen mother, who had prominent roles in Kushite religion. At Jebel Barkal, a site sacred to Amun, the Kushite king Taharqa built a pair of temples, one dedicated to Hathor and one to Mut as consorts of Amun, replacing New Kingdom Egyptian temples that may have been dedicated to these same goddesses. But Isis was the most prominent of the Egyptian goddesses worshipped in Nubia, and her status there increased over time. Thus, in the Meroitic period of Nubian history (c. 300 BC – AD 400), Hathor appeared in temples mainly as a companion to Isis.

Popular worship

In addition to formal and public rituals at temples, Egyptians privately worshipped deities for personal reasons, including at their homes. Birth was hazardous for both mother and child in ancient Egypt, yet children were much desired. Thus fertility and safe childbirth are among the most prominent concerns in popular religion, and fertility deities such as Hathor and Taweret were commonly worshipped in household shrines. Egyptian women squatted on bricks while giving birth, and the only known surviving birth brick from ancient Egypt is decorated with an image of a woman holding her child flanked by images of Hathor. In Roman times, terracotta figurines, sometimes found in a domestic context, depicted a woman with an elaborate headdress exposing her genitals, as Hathor did to cheer up Ra. The meaning of these figurines is not known, but they are often thought to represent Hathor or Isis combined with Aphrodite making a gesture that represented fertility or protection against evil.

Hathor was one of a handful of deities, including Amun, Ptah, and Thoth, who were commonly prayed to for help with personal problems. Many Egyptians left offerings at temples or small shrines dedicated to the gods they prayed to. Most offerings to Hathor were used for their symbolism, not for their intrinsic value. Cloths painted with images of Hathor were common, as were plaques and figurines depicting her animal forms. Different types of offerings may have symbolized different goals on the part of the donor, but their meaning is usually unknown. Images of Hathor alluded to her mythical roles, like depictions of the maternal cow in the marsh. Offerings of sistra may have been meant to appease the goddess's dangerous aspects and bring out her positive ones, while phalli represented a prayer for fertility, as shown by an inscription found on one example.

Some Egyptians also left written prayers to Hathor, inscribed on stelae or written as graffiti. Prayers to some deities, such as Amun, show that they were thought to punish wrongdoers and heal people who repented for their misbehavior. In contrast, prayers to Hathor mention only the benefits she could grant, such as abundant food during life and a well-provisioned burial after death.

Funerary practices

As an afterlife deity, Hathor appeared frequently in funerary texts and art. In the early New Kingdom, for instance, she was one of the three deities most commonly found in royal tomb decoration, the others being Osiris and Anubis. In that period she often appeared as the goddess welcoming the dead into the afterlife. Other images referred to her more obliquely. Reliefs in Old Kingdom tombs show men and women performing a ritual called "shaking the papyrus". The significance of this rite is not known, but inscriptions sometimes say it was performed "for Hathor", and shaking papyrus stalks produces a rustling sound that may have been likened to the rattling of a sistrum. Other Hathoric imagery in tombs included the cow emerging from the mountain of the necropolis and the seated figure of the goddess presiding over a garden in the afterlife. Images of Nut were often painted or incised inside coffins, indicating the coffin was her womb, from which the occupant would be reborn in the afterlife. In the Third Intermediate Period, Hathor began to be placed on the floor of the coffin, with Nut on the interior of the lid.

Tomb art from the Eighteenth Dynasty often shows people drinking, dancing, and playing music, as well as holding menat necklaces and sistra—all imagery that alluded to Hathor. These images may represent private feasts that were celebrated in front of tombs to commemorate the people buried there, or they may show gatherings at temple festivals such as the Beautiful Festival of the Valley. Festivals were thought to allow contact between the human and divine realms, and by extension, between the living and the dead. Thus, texts from tombs often expressed a wish that the deceased would be able to participate in festivals, primarily those dedicated to Osiris. Tombs' festival imagery, however, may refer to festivals involving Hathor, such as the Festival of Drunkenness, or to the private feasts, which were also closely connected with her. Drinking and dancing at these feasts may have been meant to intoxicate the celebrants, as at the Festival of Drunkenness, allowing them to commune with the spirits of the deceased.

Hathor was said to supply offerings to deceased people as early as the Old Kingdom, and spells to enable both men and women to join her retinue in the afterlife appeared as early as the Coffin Texts. Some burial goods that portray deceased women as goddesses may depict these women as followers of Hathor, although whether the imagery refers to Hathor or Isis is not known. The link between Hathor and deceased women was maintained into the Roman Period, the last stage of ancient Egyptian religion before its extinction.

title: Hathor


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Moral realism

Moral realism (also ethical realism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism (which accepts that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false) with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts), error theory (which denies that any moral propositions are true), and non-cognitivism (which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all). Moral realism's two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.

Most philosophers claim that moral realism dates at least to Plato as a philosophical doctrine and that it is a fully defensible form of moral doctrine. A 2009 survey involving 3,226 respondents found that 56% of philosophers accept or lean toward moral realism (28%: anti-realism; 16%: other). A 2020 study found that 62.1% accept or lean toward realism. Some notable examples of robust moral realists include David Brink, John McDowell, Peter Railton, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Michael Smith, Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau, G. E. Moore, John Finnis, Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, and Peter Singer. Norman Geras has argued that Karl Marx was a moral realist. Moral realism's various philosophical and practical applications have been studied.

Robust versus minimal moral realism
A delineation of moral realism into a minimal form, a moderate form, and a robust form has been put forward in the literature.

The robust model of moral realism commits moral realists to three theses:

 * The semantic thesis: The primary semantic role of moral predicates (such as "right" and "wrong") is to refer to moral properties (such as rightness and wrongness), so that moral statements (such as "honesty is good" and "slavery is unjust") purport to represent moral facts, and express propositions that are true or false (or approximately true, largely false, and so on).
 * The alethic thesis: Some moral propositions are in fact true.
 * The metaphysical thesis: Moral propositions are true when actions and other objects of moral assessment have the relevant moral properties (so that the relevant moral facts obtain), where these facts and properties are robust: their metaphysical status, whatever it is, is not relevantly different from that of (certain types of) ordinary non-moral facts and properties.

The minimal model leaves off the metaphysical thesis, treating it as matter of contention among moral realists (as opposed to between moral realists and moral anti-realists). This dispute is not insignificant, as acceptance or rejection of the metaphysical thesis is taken by those employing the robust model as the key difference between moral realism and moral anti-realism. Indeed, the question of how to classify certain logically possible (if eccentric) views—such as the rejection of the semantic and alethic theses in conjunction with the acceptance of the metaphysical thesis—turns on which model we accept. Someone employing the robust model might call such a view "realist non-cognitivism," while someone employing the minimal model might simply place such a view alongside other, more traditional, forms of non-cognitivism.

The robust model and the minimal model also disagree over how to classify moral subjectivism (roughly, the view that moral facts are not mind-independent in the relevant sense, but that moral statements may still be true). The historical association of subjectivism with moral anti-realism in large part explains why the robust model of moral realism has been dominant—even if only implicitly—both in the traditional and contemporary philosophical literature on metaethics.

In the minimal sense of realism, R. M. Hare could be considered a realist in his later works, as he is committed to the objectivity of value judgments, even though he denies that moral statements express propositions with truth-values per se. Moral constructivists like John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard may also be realists in this minimalist sense; the latter describes her own position as procedural realism. Some readings of evolutionary science such as those of Charles Darwin and James Mark Baldwin have suggested that in so far as an ethics may be associated with survival strategies and natural selection then such behavior may be associated with a moderate position of moral realism equivalent to an ethics of survival.

Ethical objectivism
Moral objectivism is the view that what is right or wrong does not depend on what anyone thinks is right or wrong, but rather on how it affects people's well-being. Moral objectivism allows for moral codes to be compared to each other through a set of universal facts. Nicholas Reschar says that moral codes cannot derive from one's personal moral compass. An example is Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative: "Act only according to that maxim [i.e., rule] whereby you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." John Stuart Mill proposed utilitarianism, which asserts that in any situation, the right thing to do is whatever is likely to produce the most happiness overall.

According to the ethical objectivist, the truth or falsehood of typical moral judgments does not depend upon any person's or group of persons' beliefs or feelings. This view holds that moral propositions are analogous to propositions about chemistry, biology, or history, insomuch as they are true despite what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. When they fail to describe this mind-independent moral reality, they are false—no matter what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels.

There are many versions of ethical objectivism, including various religious views of morality, Platonistic intuitionism, Kantianism, utilitarianism, and certain forms of ethical egoism and contractualism. Platonists define ethical objectivism even more narrowly, so that it requires the existence of intrinsic value. Consequently, they reject the idea that contractualists or egoists could be ethical objectivists. Objectivism, in turn, places primacy on the origin of the frame of reference and considers any arbitrary frame of reference a form of ethical subjectivism by a transitive property, even when the frame incidentally coincides with reality.

Advantages
Moral realism allows the ordinary rules of logic (modus ponens, etc.) to be applied straightforwardly to moral statements. We can say that a moral belief is false or unjustified or contradictory in the same way we would about a factual belief. This is a problem for expressivism, as shown by the Frege–Geach problem.

Another advantage of moral realism is its capacity to resolve moral disagreements: if two moral beliefs contradict one another, realism says that they cannot both be right, and therefore everyone involved ought to be seeking out the right answer to resolve the disagreement. Contrary theories of meta-ethics have trouble even formulating the statement "this moral belief is wrong," and so they cannot resolve disagreements in this way.

Proponents
Peter Railton's moral realism is often associated with a naturalist approach. He argues that moral facts can be reduced to non-moral facts and that our moral claims aim to describe an objective reality. In his well-known paper "Moral Realism" (1986), Railton advocates for a form of moral realism that is naturalistic and scientifically accessible. He suggests that moral facts can be understood in terms of the naturalistic concept of an individual's good. He employs a hypothetical observer's standpoint to explain moral judgments. This standpoint considers what fully rational, well-informed, and sympathetic agents would agree upon under ideal conditions. Railton's naturalistic approach aims to bridge the is-ought gap by explaining moral facts in terms of natural facts, and his theory is generally considered to be a response to the challenge of moral skepticism and anti-realism. By doing so, he attempts to show that moral facts are not mysterious or disconnected from the rest of the world, but can be understood and studied much like other natural phenomena.

Philippa Foot adopts a moral realist position, criticizing Stevenson's idea that when evaluation is superposed on fact there has been a "committal in a new dimension." She introduces, by analogy, the practical implications of using the word "injury." Not just anything counts as an injury. There must be some impairment. When we suppose a man wants the things the injury prevents him from obtaining, have not we fallen into the old naturalistic fallacy? "It may seem that the only way to make a necessary connection between 'injury' and the things that are to be avoided, is to say that it is only used in an 'action-guiding sense' when applied to something the speaker intends to avoid. But we should look carefully at the crucial move in that argument, and query the suggestion that someone might happen not to want anything for which he would need the use of hands or eyes. Hands and eyes, like ears and legs, play a part in so many operations that a man could only be said not to need them if he had no wants at all."

Foot argues that the virtues, like hands and eyes in the analogy, play so large a part in so many operations that it is implausible to suppose that a committal in a non-naturalist dimension is necessary to demonstrate their goodness. "Philosophers who have supposed that actual action was required if 'good' were to be used in a sincere evaluation have got into difficulties over weakness of will, and they should surely agree that enough has been done if we can show that any man has reason to aim at virtue and avoid vice. But is this impossibly difficult if we consider the kinds of things that count as virtue and vice? Consider, for instance, the cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, courage and justice. Obviously any man needs prudence, but does he not also need to resist the temptation of pleasure when there is harm involved? And how could it be argued that he would never need to face what was fearful for the sake of some good? It is not obvious what someone would mean if he said that temperance or courage were not good qualities, and this not because of the 'praising' sense of these words, but because of the things that courage and temperance are."

W. D. Ross articulates his moral realism in analogy to mathematics by stating that the moral order is just as real as "the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic".

In his defense of Divine Command Theory and thereby moral realism, C. Stephen Evans comments that the fact that there are significant moral disagreements does not undermine moral realism. Much of what may appear to be moral disagreement is actually disagreement over facts. In abortion debates, for example, the crux of the issue may really be whether a fetus is a human person. He goes on to comment that there are in fact tremendous amounts of moral agreement. There are five common principles that are recognized by different human cultures, including (1) A general duty not to harm others and a general duty to benefit others; (2) Special duties to those with whom one has special relations, such as friends and family members; (3) Duties to be truthful; (4) Duties to keep one's commitments and promises; (5) Duties to deal fairly and justly with others.

Criticisms
Several criticisms have been raised against moral realism. A prominent criticism, articulated by J.L. Mackie, is that moral realism postulates the existence of "entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them it would have to be by some faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else." A number of theories have been developed for how we access objective moral truths, including ethical intuitionism and moral sense theory.

Another criticism of moral realism put forth by Mackie is that it can offer no plausible explanation for cross-cultural moral differences— ethical relativism. "The actual variations in the moral codes are more readily explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values".

The evolutionary debunking argument suggests that because human psychology is primarily produced by evolutionary processes which do not seem to have a reason to be sensitive to moral facts, taking a moral realist stance can only lead to moral skepticism. The aim of the argument is to undercut the motivations for taking a moral realist stance, namely to be able to assert there are reliable moral standards.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Moral realism


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Ihy

Ihy is a young god in Egypt usually portrayed with the sistrum. This is in allusion to his mother Hathor who was associated with the instrument. Ihy's symbols are the sistrum and a necklace. The name Ihy depicts the joy of playing the hand instrument by Hathor, or "calf." The Egyptians themselves associated the name with the noisemaker. Other goddesses including Isis, Sekhmet, and Neith are also sometimes seen as his mothers in different legends. War deity Horus is Ihy's father, but sometimes solar deity Ra is also seen as his father. Ihy was depicted as a naked child, with curly hair, wearing a necklace and holding a sistrum or as a nude child with his finger in his mouth. He was worshipped along with Horus and Hathor as a trio at Dendera, Ihy's main cult site, constructed early in the 4th dynasty.

Emperor Augustus prepared a second "birthing house" in the temple of Ihy's mother, with pictures of Ihy's birth and celebrations painted on the wall. Ihy is shown as the god of bread, beer, coffins, and the Book of the dead. There were mystery plays in 13 acts on fertility in these temples.

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CNT

CNT may refer to:

Organized labor

 * Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the National Confederation of Labor, a Spanish confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labor unions
 * Central Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT), the National Workers' Central (Paraguay), a national trade union center in Paraguay
 * Confédération nationale du travail (CNT-F), the National Confederation of Labour, a French anarcho-syndicalist union
 * Confédération Nigérienne du Travail, the Nigerien Confederation of Labour, a trade union federation in Niger
 * Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores - Convención Nacional de Trabajadores PIT-CNT, a national trade union center in Uruguay

Science and technology

 * Carbon nanotube, an allotrope of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure
 * Classical nucleation theory
 * Computer Network Technology Corporation, an enterprise acquired by McData in January 2005; see Ultra Network Technologies
 * Columbia Non-neutral Torus, a small stellarator at the Columbia University Plasma Physics Laboratory in New York City

Television

 * Central Nacional de Televisão (CNT), or Central National Television, a Brazilian television network in Curitiba/Paraná, Brazil
 * CNT EP, the public telecommunications company in Ecuador
 * Conglomerated National Television, a fictional television network in HD Universe of Grand Theft Auto series.

Other uses

 * CN Telecommunications, the former telecommunications unit of Canadian National Railway
 * Confectionery, news and tobacco, a retail sector often served by small booths or newsagents
 * Cantiere Navale Triestino (CNT), an Austro-Hungarian, later Italian, shipbuilding company founded in 1908 and renamed Cantieri Riuniti dell' Adriatico (CRDA) Monfalcone in 1929
 * Commission for New Towns, a former planning and development agency in the UK.
 * Center for Neighborhood Technology, an American non-profit organization committed to sustainable development and livable urban communities
 * C*nt (Cunt), a swear word

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Talk:Syndicalism

GA ready?
This is a very comprehensive and well-researched article, and has been for quite some time. Given that this is a level-5 vital article, I wondered if a good article nomination might be one the cards. Of course, the primary article contributor (@Carabinieri) hasn't been active since 2020, so I'm not sure if they would even be available to submit it. @Davide King has also done a lot of work copy-editing the article recently, but as they haven't authored at least 10% of the article's text, it may be considered a drive-by nomination if there's not prior discussion about it. Is there anything that anyone feels needs adding to this article or changing before a GA nomination? What do we think needs doing in order to get it there? --Grnrchst (talk) 15:06, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Syndicalism


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Plön

Plön (Holsatian: Plöön) is the district seat of the Plön district in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, and has about 8,700 inhabitants. It lies right on the shores of Schleswig-Holstein's biggest lake, the Great Plön Lake, as well as on several smaller lakes, touching the town on virtually all sides. The town's landmark is Plön Castle, a chateau built in the 17th century on a hill overlooking the town.

Plön has a grammar school with a 300-year history, and is home to a German Navy non-commissioned officer school and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. The town, nestled as it is in the hilly, wooded lake district of Holstein Switzerland (Holsteinische Schweiz), also has importance in the tourism industry.

History
In the course of the Migration Period, Slavic tribes entered the region of Plön during the early 7th century following the withdrawal of the original Germanic population. On the large island opposite Plön, which was later called Olsborg, they built a large fortification. They called their settlement Plune, which means "ice-free water".

In 1075, Kruto lured Budivoj of the Nakonids into the "castrum plunense" (according to Helmold of Bosau), laid siege to him, and then once Budivoj's men had given themselves up after Kruto's promises to let them withdraw freely, Kruto had them slain. In 1139 the Count of Holstein, Adolf II of Schauenburg, destroyed the fortress, ending the domination of the Slavs in the region of Plön. Twenty years later, Adolf II had the castle on the island rebuilt, but soon had it moved to the present hill of Schlossberg ("castle hill"). It was here, under the protection of the castle and close to the major trading route from Lübeck to the north, that a Saxon market town emerged.

In 1236, Plön was granted town rights under Lübeck law. Strategically located on a narrow isthmus between the lakes and the River Schwentine, Plön remained a centre of the County of Holstein until the Danish royal house fell in the 15th century.

Between 1561 and 1729, Plön was the capital of the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Plön. The Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Plön emerged in 1622 as a result of succession in the Danish royal house. From 1633 to 1636 a Renaissance castle was built on the site of the old castle by Duke Joachim Ernest, and Plön became the capital of the small but independent princedom. As a residence town Plön experienced a considerable increase in status. For example, in 1685 Duke John Adolphus ("Hans Adolf") founded the new town (Neustadt) northwest of the town in order to settle craftsmen here and thus increase the economic might of the duchy. Under Charles Frederick the castle district was expanded with several baroque buildings and a pleasure garden. At that time the town had about 1,000 inhabitants and reached as far as the bridge over the Schwentine in the east and as far as the end of today's pedestrian zone in the west. Both entrances were protected by gates.

In 1761 the Duchy fell back into the hands of the Danish crown. Plön remained under Danish rule until the Second Schleswig War in 1864. Although it was the Danish king's summer residence from time to time, it remained otherwise a sleepy provincial town of about 2,000 inhabitants. The cultural life of the minor residence was charmingly described by Rochus von Liliencron in his "Childhood Memories". In the mid-19th century, the Danish crown prince spent a few years of his summer vacation in Plön Castle, since when it has been decorated in white plaster with a gray roof.

In 1867 Plön became a county town following the introduction of Prussian administrative reforms. The Hohenzollern princes were educated for a time in Plön. The Princes' Island (Prinzeninsel) is still owned by the House of Hohenzollern. Since 1868, Plön Castle was a Prussian military school. After World War I it became a boarding school that served as a 1933–1945 as a National Political Institutes of Education. Since 1946, it has again been a state boarding school. After the end of World War II, former NAPOLA pupils were often able to avail themselves of a form of ‘evasive selective memory’ that ultimately cast themselves as victims of the Nazi regime, and allowed them to make their own (sometimes very successful) way in postwar society. During the War, numerous forced laborers lived in Plön and the surrounding area. In the Plön cemetery, eight wooden crosses commemorate people who were probably forced laborers from Eastern Europe. According to a police report, forced laborers who were no longer able to work allegedly 'drowned while going swimming' in the Plöner See.

In 1891 Emil Otto Zacharias founded the first "Biological Station" for freshwater research on German soil on the Plöner See. It was established as a private research institute with the aid of financial support from the Prussian government and several private citizens. After his death, August Thienemann took the lead. Its successor for a long time was the Max Planck Institute of Limnology, now renamed the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (see weblinks).

The Wehrmacht barracks at Stadtheide near Plön became the temporary location of the remaining members of the Hitler cabinet who had fled Berlin after the death of Adolf Hitler on 30 April 1945. Hitler believed that Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler was located in Plön and ordered newly appointed Luftwaffe commander Robert Ritter von Greim to fly there to arrest him. However, Himmler had left several hours before Von Greim's arrival.

On 1 May, Commander of the Navy, Admiral Karl Dönitz, moved into the buildings of the Stadtheide Barracks but it was to be a short stay. Dönitz announced that Hitler had fallen and had appointed him as his successor. On 2 May Dönitz and the new Government Executive of the Reich fled to Flensburg before the approaching British troops and formed the short-lived Flensburg Government.

After WWII Plon was chosen as the site for King Alfred School, a secondary school for British Forces children under the headmastership of Freddie Spencer Chapman with his staff at the Ruhleben Barracks site, As such the town holds a place of affection with many former pupils across the world and the declining number of surviving teachers and their families. King Alfred School, Plön can rightly claim to be the first fully comprehensive school in the UK system. This school existed from 1948 to 1959. The Ruhleben Barracks site had been the German Navy U-boat training school and has now reverted to a similar function as M.U.S the non-commissioned officer school. The street nearby has a Lighthouse restaurant and down the street is a camping trailer park then a drug abusal hospital and a retirement castle. There are interesting free time activities like canoeing, walking and wandering in the woods or on the great lake.

The German boarding school in Plön Castle was closed in 2001 under the state government of Heide Simonis and the castle was sold to the Fielmann optical company. They re-opened it in October 2006, after extensive restoration work, as a school for opticians. The total cost of refurbishment and reconstruction was 35 million euros. Today it is a non-profit training centre for the whole field of optics. This has strengthened the economy of the town of Plön, which has become more widely known, even internationally. Each year the castle is home to six thousand Fielmann employees who receive training for anything up to a two-week period. Other students at the castle take part in B.A. and master optician courses. The castle has extensive grounds and is one of the most beautiful castles in Schleswig-Holstein. There are several restored historic buildings - such as the Princes' House (Prinzenhaus), Old Swimming Baths (Alte Schwimmhalle), Clock House (Uhrenhaus) - as well as shady avenues and old trees open to the public to stroll through and explore. Parts of Günther Fielmann's own antique collection can be viewed at the castle; it encompasses pieces from the major north European and French epochs since the mid-seventeenth century.

The Princes' House is affectionately called the "Pearl of the Rococo Period". It was previously used as a summer house and was given its present name when the sons of the last German Emperor, William II were taught in this building. After several years of restoration, it is now again open to the public. The Uhrenhaus now contains the information centre for the Holstein Switzerland Nature Park. The former imperial swimming pool is now a cultural forum, which is available for events and exhibitions. Evidence of the imperial era is still visible in many parts of Plon. For example, there is on the Princes' Island, a thatched pavilion, from where there is a view of the Great Plön Lake - this was a favourite haunt of the Empress. In the chapel at the Old Cemetery is an altar donated by Empress Augusta Victoria.

Relics of the Cold War can be found in the form of explosive vehicle traps along the Fünf-Seen-Allee ("Five Lake Lane") near the old Five Lake Barracks (formerly home to the 6th Engineer Battalion (Pionierbataillon 6) and 6th Panzergrenadier Division), in Plön-Stadtheide.

Town council
Plön's town council consists of 23 councillors. (as of municipal election on May 2013)

Mayor
After a runoff on 21 November 2004 Jens Paustian became Plön's mayor. In 2016 Lars Winter won the elections and is now the mayor

Coat of arms
The coat of arms shows on a silver background above silver and blue waves in which a red fish is swimming, a red, full-width, low crenellated wall made of bricks, on top of which is a short, red crenellated tower with two black window arches; over the tower hovers Holstein's coat of arms (in red a silver nettle leaf)

Partnerships

 * 🇩🇪 Plau am See, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, since 1990
 * 🇷🇺 A sponsorship arrangement also exists with the town of Zhilino (formerly the German town of Schillen) in the old Tilsit-Ragnit district in Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, in what was once East Prussia.
 * 🇹🇳 Ksour Essef, Tunisia, since 1969
 * 🇪🇪Plöns Kreis is the partnership of Lääne-Virumaa county in Estonia

Transport
The railway line between Kiel and Lübeck, on which trains run half-hourly in each direction, runs through Plön. Plön station became known Germany-wide as a result of the early evening television series, Kleinstadtbahnhof ("small town station"), which was filmed here and starred Heidi Kabel and Gustav Knuth. In the series the town was called "Lüttin".

The town is a highway hub, being on the junction of the federal roads (Bundesstraßen) B 76 (east-west) and B 430 (southwest-northeast).

Suburbs
The village of Koppelsberg lies on the B 430 to the west of the town. The village of Sandkaten (municipality of Bösdorf) and the new suburb of Stadtheide lie on the B 76 to the east of the town. Most of Stadtheide is built on the newly reclaimed terrain of the old engineer barracks.

Plön Castle
Plön Castle is one of the most important Renaissance buildings in the country. Until the death of Duke Frederick Charles of Schleswig-Holstein-Plön in 1761 it was the ducal Residenz; thereafter it was used for various purposes. Today it is owned by the firm of Fielmann.

Parnass Tower
The Parnass Tower is a 20-metre-high, steel lattice tower on a stone plinth erected in 1888 as an observation tower by the Plön Tourism Society (Plöner Verschönerungsverein). It is open from April to October.

Water tower
The old Plön Water Tower (Wasserturm Plön) of 1913 lies in the east of the town and is used today as a residence.

Planet Walk
On Plön's Planet Walk the solar system is mapped on a scale of 1:2,000,000,000, starting from a symbol of the sun on the landing stage on Market Bridge.

Museums
Museums in Plön include the Museum of Plön District with its North German glass collection, the Nature Park House, the Plön Princes' House (Prinzenhaus) and the Fritz-During Foundation in Plön District.

Krieglstein Puppet Theatre
Opposite the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (until 2007: the MPI for Limnology) is the Krieglstein Puppet Theatre. Ute Krieglstein designed the yarn dolls, including the set and plays songs, composed by her, with her husband, Gerd, who is responsible for the technology. After years as a touring company in Germany, in other European countries and several guest performances in South Korea their company, "Puppen & Co", has had a permanent venue in Plön since 2000.

Literature: "Wonderful times in Wonderful Plön"
"My romantic attachment began, of course, in the cradle, shaped by the whole course of those early days. It grew stronger, not least through the nourishment it received from the romantic beauty of Plön and its countryside. The little town nestles, surrounded by lakes, on a narrow strip of land encircling the low hill, whose heights are occupied by the old ducal palace, ringed by old trees, avenues and terraced, sloping gardens. Around the sprawling waters of the lakes, which can be seen from above in a single sweeping gaze, runs a belt of beautiful beech forest over serries of hills, interspersed with a gay, fertile landscape. When, in the evening of a bright summer's day, the moon casts its beams over the gently stirring waves of the lake surface, what a wonderful decoration to play romantic games with the heart over the terraces and under the old trees…' ~ Rochus von Liliencron, 1902, in his Jugenderinnerungen ('Memories of Childhood')"

Personalities

 * Georg Michael Telemann (1748–1831), church musician and composer
 * Friedrich Carl Gröger (1766–1838), portrait painter and lithographer
 * Rochus von Liliencron (1820–1912), Germanist, music historian and editor of the  Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie
 * Karl Christian Bruhns (1830–1881), astronomer
 * Georg Kuphaldt (1853–1938), gardener, landscape architect, dendrologist,
 * Karl von Graffen (1893–1964), general lieutenant in the Second World War
 * Karl Mauss (1898–1959), officer and general
 * Lauritz Lauritzen (1910–1980), politician 8(SPD)
 * Nick St. Nicholas (1941-, Bass player American Rock Band Steppenwolf

title: Plön


text:
Maahes

Maahes (also spelled in Greek: Mihos, Miysis, Mios, Maihes, or Mahes) (Greek: Μαχές, Μιχός, Μίυσις, Μίος, or Μάιχες) was an ancient Egyptian lion-headed god of war, whose name means "he who is true beside her". He was seen as the son of the Creator god Ptah, as well as the feline goddess (Bast in Lower Egypt or Sekhmet in Upper Egypt) whose nature he shared. Maahes was a deity associated with war, protection, and weather, as well as that of knives, lotuses, and devouring captives. His cult was centred in Taremu and Per-Bast, the cult centres of Sekhmet and Bast respectively.

Name
The name of Maahes begins with the hieroglyphs for the male lion, although in isolation it also means (one who can) see in front. Some of the titles of Maahes were Lord of Slaughter, Wielder of the Knife, and The Scarlet Lord.

Origin
The first recorded reference to Maahes is from the New Kingdom. Some Egyptologists have suggested that Maahes was of foreign origin; indeed there is some evidence that he may have been identical with the lion-god Apedemak worshipped in Nubia and Egypt's Western Desert.

Maahes was considered the son of Ra with the feline goddess Bastet, or of another feline goddess, Sekhmet. He was sometimes identified with another son of Sekhmet, Nefertum. Maahes was said to fight Ra's archenemy, the serpent Apep, during Ra's nightly voyage.

Considered to have powerful attributes, feline deities were associated with the pharaohs, and became patrons of Egypt. The male lion hieroglyph was used in words such as "prince", "mashead", "strength", and "power".

Depictions
Maahes was pictured as a man with the head of a male lion, sometimes holding a knife and a bouquet of lotus flowers, referring to his connection with Nefertum, who was symbolized by the lotus.

Sacred animals
Tame lions were kept in a temple dedicated to Maahes in Taremu, where Bast/Sekhmet were worshipped, his temple was adjacent to that of Bast. The ancient Greek historian Aelian wrote: "In Egypt, they worship lions, and there is a city called after them. (...) The lions have temples and numerous spaces in which to roam; the flesh of oxen is supplied to them daily (...) and the lions eat to the accompaniment of song in the Egyptian language", thus the Greek name of the city Leontopolis was derived.

title: Maahes


text:
Bisu

Bisu or BISU may refer to:
 * Bisu (festival), a festival celebrated in South Canara region in Karnataka and Kerala as New year, India
 * Bisu (marque), a Chinese automotive brand.
 * Beijing International Studies University, a Chinese university in Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
 * Bohol Island State University, a public university in the Philippines
 * Bes or Bisu, an Egyptian deity
 * Bisu, the alias of Kim Taek-Yong (born 1989), professional StarCraft player from South Korea
 * Bisu language, a language of the Sino-Tibetan family
 * Ingrid Bisu (born 1987), actress and producer

title: Bisu


text:
Bes

Bes (also spelled as Bisu, Ⲃⲏⲥ), together with his feminine counterpart Beset, is an ancient Egyptian deity, likely of Kushite/Nubian or Nehesi C-Group culture origin worshipped as a protector of households and, in particular, of mothers, children, and childbirth. Bes later came to be regarded as the defender of everything good and the enemy of all that is bad. According to Donald Mackenzie in 1907, Bes may have been a Middle Kingdom import from Nubia or Somalia, and his cult did not become widespread until the beginning of the New Kingdom, but more recently several Bes-like figurines have been found in deposits from the Naqada period of pre-dynastic Egypt, like the thirteen figurines found at Tell el-Farkha.

Worship of Bes spread as far north as the area of Syria and as far west as the Balearic Islands (Ibiza) in Spain, and later into the Roman and Achaemenid Empires.

Origin
People in Upper Egypt started venerating Bes long before people in Lower Egypt. The word “bes” means “cat” in Nubian, suggesting a possible Nubian or southern origin of Bes. It is also possible that the name Bes originated from one of two hieroglyphs: "bs", meaning "flame", possibly in connection to Re, and/or "bz", meaning "to be initiated" or "to introduce" possibly in reference to masks apparently used in the cult of the god. Bes originally looked like a cat standing on his hind legs, before becoming more anthropomorphic and usually depicted with a leopard skin around his neck and resembling a person with dwarfism.

Bes is first mentioned in the Pyramid Texts, but seems to have been best known and most widely worshiped in the Middle Kingdom. Evidence of Bes worship in some capacity exists into Coptic Egypt, with the latest evidence being a jug depicting Bes found in Tell Edfu dating to the 10th century CE.

Worship

Bes was a household protector, becoming responsible– throughout ancient Egyptian history– for such varied tasks as killing snakes, fighting off evil spirits, watching after children, and aiding women in labour by fighting off evil spirits, and thus present with Taweret at births.

Images of the deity, quite different from those of the other gods, were kept in homes. Normally Egyptian gods were shown in profile, but instead Bes appeared in full face portrait, ithyphallic, and sometimes in a soldier's tunic, so as to appear ready to launch an attack on any approaching evil. He scared away demons from houses, so his statue was put up as a protector. Since he drove off evil, Bes also came to symbolize the good things in life– music, dance, and sexual pleasure. In the Middle Kingdom, Bes is depicted on a variety of objects, including masks, amulets, infant feeding bottles, and magic knives. In the New Kingdom, tattoos of Bes could be found on the thighs of dancers, musicians and servant girls.

Later, in the Ptolemaic period of Egyptian history, chambers were constructed at Saqqara, painted with images of Bes and his female counterpart Beset, thought by Egyptologists to have been for the purpose of curing fertility problems or general healing rituals.

Like many Egyptian gods, the worship of Bes or Beset was exported overseas. While the female variant had been more popular in Minoan Crete, the male version would prove popular with the Phoenicians and the ancient Cypriots.

At the end of the 6th century BC, images of Bes began to spread across the Achaemenid Empire, which Egypt belonged to at the time. Images of Bes have been found at the Persian capital of Susa, and as far away as central Asia. Over time, the image of Bes became more Persian in style, as he was depicted wearing Persian clothes and headdress.

Figurines
Modern scholars such as James Romano- Egyptologist and former Curator of Egyptian Art at the Brooklyn Museum- claim that in its earliest inception Bes was a representation of a lion rearing up on its hind legs. After the Third Intermediate Period, Bes can be found on a variety of household objects including furniture, toiletries, infant feeding bottles, game pieces, and more beginning in the Middle Kingdom.

Tattoos
As mentioned above, Bes is also seen depicted in tattoos. Wall art from the 19th Dynasty found at the workman's village of Deir El-Medina depicts a tattoo of a dancing Bes on the thigh of a female musician playing her instrument.

Jugs
Jugs, vases, and other storage containers represent the majority of pottery containing Bes iconography. The depiction of an anthropomorphic head on jugs is a style predominately found in West Asian pottery, suggesting that there may be influence from the Syro-Palestinian region. Further supporting the possibility of West Asian influence is tomb 1300 of the Mayana cemetery near Sedment dating from the Second Intermediate Period that contains both vases depicting Bes and five small faience jugs almost certainly of Palestinian origin. This, along with other objects likely of West Asian origin indicates that the occupant likely maintained contact with Palestine, and as such the West Asian style Bes jug may have been manufactured there.

Painted storage jars depicting Bes have also been found in the site of Amarna dating to the late 18th Dynasty, in addition to a multitude of jars found in Deir el-Medina. In addition to these jars as well as aforementioned depictions on bedroom paraphernalia, faience baby bottles have been found in el-Lisht, further showing Bes as a protector of children.

Popular culture

 * Bes appears, as part of the delegation of Egyptian gods, in The Sandman: Season of Mists (December 1990 – July 1991), by Neil Gaiman.
 * Bes appears as a trickster in Mummies Alive! (1997) animated series.
 * Bes appears as a character in Otherland: volume 3 Mountain of Black Glass (1999) by Tad Williams. His physical description reflects traditional iconography.
 * Bes is a friend and helper to the heroes in Pyramid Scheme (2001) by Eric Flint and Dave Freer.
 * Bes appears, as a god of love in the Egyptian movie Secret Service Suitor (Aris min geha amneya) (2004).
 * Bes is an important character in the books of the saga The Kane Chronicles (2010–2012) by Rick Riordan.
 * Bes appears in the video game Realm of the Mad God (2011) as a boss of an Egyptian themed dungeon known as the "Tomb of the Ancients", alongside Nut and Geb.
 * Bes appears in “the Nikopol Trilogy” (1980-1992), by Enki Bilal, alongside several of the ancient gods of Egypt, hovering over a dystopian Paris and world.

title: Bes


text:
Apet

Apet or APET may refer to

 * Apet, a former romanization of Egyptian Ipet ("The Nurse"), a hippo-headed protective goddess closely associated or conflated with Taweret
 * apet, a former romanization of Egyptian ipet or ip.t, an Ancient Egyptian unit of volume
 * APET, an abbreviation of "amorphous polyethylene terephthalate"

title: Apet