@sakuraswordly / sakuraswordly.tumblr.com
Here she is, the Legend herself,
Isis
This was an art project for school. Turned out way better than I expected given that I've never done printmaking before. Carving the stamp and cutting out the different sections was way harder than I thought it'd be. I think I needed way smaller tools to get the fine details I wanted.
. . .Osiris
Osiris (Great and Beautiful is He) is the God of the Underworld; its King and Pharaoh ruling over the Duat. He is pictured here on the far left, His skin green and His body in mummiform. This is commonly how He is depicted; as a green-skinned, mummified man.
Son of Nut, the Sky Goddess, and Geb, the Earth God, Osiris was the first King of Egypt in accordance with Kemetic mythology, although there are stories that recount Geb, His father, being King before Him. There are a great deal of myths and stories that surround and involve Osiris, and I suppose it is important to at least skim over them before discussing hard facts about Him, as it gives some reference as to who He is and what the culture surrounding Him is like.
The Nile wasn’t just the only river of Egypt and its main body of water: the Nile was the water around which Egypt built itself and without which Egyptians couldn’t survive. Their religion, society and calendar all shaped themselves based on the Nile, because it was a crucial element in the life of any Ancient Egyptian. The three seasons of the Egyptian calendars were “shemu”, “the sowing”, “peret”, “the harvest” and “akhet”, “the flooding”. You see, the Nile had a yearly flooding, and this even was so important that it became the focus of an entire Egyptian season. The flooding actually poured water over the fields and crops surrounding the Nile, helping the plants grow for the future harvest, and it also left on the shores a lot of silt, which fertilized the earth. Without the yearly flood of the Nile, the lands near it would end up as dry and arid as other parts of Egypt, and the crops would fail, meaning an ensured famine. But on the flipside, the Nile’s flooding could become very dangerous, because if it was too big, too brutal, too violent, it could drown fields and destroy crops instead of helping them grow… As a result, Egyptians made sure they used all the religious and magical methods they could to be certain of having a “good flood” each year. And one of those means was by personifying and embodying the measured and fertilizing flood in the shape of a god: the very-well named Hapi.
Hapi was the spirit of the Nile and the divinization of the Nile’s flood. He was the being that gave the waters of the Nile their movement, vitality and fertility – he was the one who made sure the good black silt ended up on the shores, and that Egypt became a land of prosperity. Pharaohs whose rule led to a time of abundance for Egypt were often depicted as Hapi on paintings. Among the god’s titles you could find “Lord of the River Bringing Vegetation”, or “Lord of the Fish and the Birds of the Marshes”. Hapi was believed to live in an underground cavern, under the first cataract of the Nile, near Aswan, under the island of Elephantine. There, each year the god started the yearly flood by pouring two enormous jars of water into the river. Once this was done, Hapi left this first lair of his to move to the other part of Egypt, the Lower-Egypt, where he settled in a grotto located this time near Memphis, and there he also poured two jugs of water, to make sure the flood happened in both parts of the country. These two areas were also the places where his cult took place, and where people threw in the water food, sacrificed animals or magical amulets to make sure Hapi would be kind to them – a lot of food was also thrown into the Nile during Hapi’s feast day, the feast of Ope, which celebrated the arrival of the flood (the flood itself being called “the arrival of Hapi”). In Upper-Egypt, Hapi was notably said to work with the god ruling over his living region, Khnum, and with two local Nile-guardian deities, Anukis and Satis: it was said they formed the stocks of silt that later Hapi delivered on the shores of the Nile.
Hapi is very noticeable due to his unique androgynous appearance. Hapi was a man, and paintings clarified that by having him wear the “fake-beard” typical of pharaohs (again, the pharaoh was identified with Hapi because he was supposedly in charge of maintaining the prosperity and abundance of Egypt). However, Hapi also sports long and fleshy female breasts, which are a physical manifestation of him being a spirit of fecundity and fertility. To that is added a rotund and plump belly, which was a visual manifestation of wealth. Sometimes Hapi was depicted with a bluish-green skin, supposed to be the same color as the waters of the Nile. More interestingly, Hapi was often “multiplied”. For example, many paintings depict a full line of Hapis coming towards the master of a temple – these multiple Hapis, called “the Niles”, were supposed to depict the many subdivisions of the river. Each one holds a different item in his hands: flowers, fruits, fishes… They are the various offerings born out/produced from each of the regions of Egypt, and if the Niles bring them to the master of a temple, it is because Hapi offers what he produces to the gods. Indeed, despite his very important role in the Egyptian life, Hapi wasn’t considered a superior or major god – no, he was rather a minor and secondary deity, who must often acted as the servant of more powerful gods and goddesses, and who fed them with the products of his own fertility. A much more common depiction of Hapi was the “Hapi twins” – painting Hapi not as one, but as two identically-looking deities, which intertwined plants together. This dual representation was meant to represent the Nile portion of Upper Egypt and the Nile portion of Lower Egypt, which united their forces and worked together to make Egypt one great and rich nation: one Hapi was crowned with and holding in his hand papyrus leaves, symbolizing Upper-Egypt, while the other was crowned with and holding in his hand lotus flowers, the flower of Lower Egypt. Their alliance was symbolized by how they intertwined these two regional plants together – it was called the “sema-taouy”, the symbolical union of Upper and Lower Egypt. [In terms of animal-companions, the Upper Egypt Hapi was usually surrounded by crocodiles, whereas the Lower Egypt one was followed by frogs]
Beyond his role as the spirit of the Nile, Hapi also had another function as a funeral god! Indeed, in the process of mummification, the Egyptians removed from their dead four organs deemed to be sacred and essential to the survival of the deceased in the afterlife – these organs were to be kept in special urns called the “canopy vases”. To make sure these precious elements were not destroyed, each canopy vase was shaped in the image of a minor god, who together were supposed to guard the organs. Hapi was one of those four gods – in charge of keeping the lungs of the dead. The other three gods were Imsety (a human-looking god) watching over the liver, Qebehsenuef (falcon-god) watching over the intestines, and Duamutef (jackal-god) guarding the stomach. Together, these four guarding deities were collectively known as “The Four Sons of Horus”.
EDIT: I checked and discovered that, quite fascinatingly, while sometimes in Egyptian mythology Hapi was seen as a minor figure, a secondary spirit that mostly acted as a servant and “feeder” of the gods (as I described above), other times he was described in the very opposite way. Due to all of the fertility of Egypt relying on him, he was sometimes called the “father of the gods”, and seen as the source of every life, as well as the one maintaining the balance and order of the cosmos through a measured annual flooding. After all, the river Nile (and thus Hapi himself) were thought to come from/be formed out of the Nun, the primordial water and primitive ocean before the world was created and from which the first gods and the sun itself were born.
[Projet Cartouches "Egyptian Gods"] Petit projet terminé (à moins que j'ai d'autres idées pour d'autres dieux et déesses ~) avec six cartouches qui donneront des visuels pour des stickers avant d'être simplifié pour de possibles pin's.
This is what I did for my Middle Egyptian practice today. If there are any ghosts of 18th dynasty Ancient Egyptians on tumblr then I hope they find this to be a funny meme.
(I might have gotten something wrong here since I’m still learning the language, but this was very fun to make, especially since already I knew how to spell all the words in it except for the names.)
Translation:
Says I: “May we get gods?”
Says the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Neferkheperura Akhenaten: “There is god at home.”
This god which is at home:
Imagery from Khonsu’s Temple within the Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor, Thebes.
The Karnak complex is massive and it’s temples ornately decorated despite their age. I took these photos near the end of July—it was over 45 degrees celsius, so there were few people there. The experience, especially because of the lack of people, was richly unique and beneficial to the soul.
Hatmehyt, Foremost of the Fish ~ “A piece for the Black Lives Matter fundraiser commissioned by @syntheticlazurite”
“Hatmehyt (or Hatmehit) was a fish-goddess worshipped in the Delta area of Ancient Egypt, particularly in Mendes. The standard for the Nome was the symbol of a fish, confirming Hatmehyt as the pre-eminent deity of the area. It is likely that there was a temple dedicated to her in Mendes at one point, but her worship does not seem to have spread out of the Delta area – perhaps because fish were generally seen as taboo.
Her name can be translated as “She who is in front of the fishes” or “Foremost of the fish”. This could either suggest that Hatmehyt was the most important of the (few) fish cults, or that she was considered to be the oldest fish deity. She was sometimes depicted as a fish (either a dolphin or a lepidotus fish) or a woman with a “Fish” emblem on her head.”
Hathor (ḥwt-ḥr meaning ‘House of Horas’) was a major goddess who played a wide variety of roles including love, fertility, women, sky, music and dance in Egyptian mythology. 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 originally a personification of the Milky Way, which was considered to be the milk that flowed from the udders of a heavenly cow. Hathor was also known as ‘Lady of Stars’ and ‘Sovereign of Stars’ and linked to the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius.
artwork by Yliade
