Research / Episode 4
Sekhmet: the goddess the myth never names
Everyone tells this story as Sekhmet's. The peer-reviewed encyclopedia entry devoted to the myth does not name her once. It calls her Hathor, the Eye of Ra. We checked that by scanning the full text rather than trusting our own note, and the check also caught us overstating it.
The absence, and how we verified it
The story comes from the composition Egyptologists call the Book of the Heavenly Cow: Ra, grown old and hearing that humanity is plotting against him, sends his Eye to punish them, and the slaughter has to be stopped by trickery. The lioness of that slaughter is the figure popular retellings call Sekhmet.
The UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology entry written specifically about this myth, by Guilhou, never uses the name. We scanned the full document text: zero occurrences of Sekhmet in any spelling, against six of Hathor, across roughly twenty-five thousand characters. So the statement we make on screen is precise: the scholarly entry devoted to this myth calls her Hathor.
Where we overstated it, and corrected ourselves
Our first version of that claim was broader: that the peer-reviewed record on this myth never names Sekhmet. That is false, and we cut it. A different UCLA Encyclopedia entry, by Poo, on liquids in temple ritual, does name her, and ties her directly to this story, describing Hathor-Sakhmet in Ptolemaic and Roman temples as "Lady of Drunkenness" in allusion to the Destruction of Mankind.
That evidence does not weaken the point, it sharpens it. Poo writes one hyphenated divine name, Hathor-Sakhmet, not two separate goddesses. The interesting thing was never that Sekhmet is absent from the record; it is that the raging lioness and the gentle Hathor are the same power in two states.
The red beer, and a disagreement we leave open
The slaughter is stopped by flooding the fields with beer dyed red so the lioness mistakes it for blood, drinks, and sleeps. Egypt held Festivals of Drunkenness, and the obvious move is to present them as commemorating this myth.
We do not, because the specialists disagree. Two entries in the same peer-reviewed encyclopedia, published about six weeks apart in 2010, take opposite views: one derives the festivals from the myth, the other argues against it from the absence of the myth in the beer-offering liturgies. There is no settled answer and we say so rather than pick the tidier version.
The statue number you have heard is not a fact
Sekhmet statues survive in remarkable numbers, and a very common claim is that there were seven hundred and thirty of them, one for each day of the year counted twice. We do not make that claim in any form. There is no agreed total, and the various figures in circulation answer different questions: how many survive, how many a given excavation found, how many a particular museum holds. Where the statues originally stood is also contested, and the institutions differ in confidence rather than in conclusion.
What we deliberately left out
Several vivid details did not make the episode because we could not verify them to our own standard from the sources this research pass allowed. Among them: the named roster of Ra's divine council and the advice spoken there, the figure of seven thousand jars of beer, and a "Hall of Drunkenness" at the precinct of Mut, which we could not source at all.
We also quote no line of the Egyptian text itself. The standard English translation is Wente's, and we did not have it in hand during this pass, so rather than put a translated line in quotation marks on someone else's authority we paraphrase throughout. That is the single largest gap in this episode's research and we would rather name it than paper over it.
One further open question we present as open: a papyrus in Leiden describes twelve arrow-shooting figures associated with her, and specialists differ on whether they are gods or lesser spirits. We give both readings.
Sources used for this episode
The Book of the Heavenly Cow; Guilhou's UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology entry on the myth and Poo's entry on liquids in temple ritual, both 2010, both read in full rather than in summary; Papyrus Leiden I 346 for the arrow-shooting figures; and object records read on each holding institution's own catalogue page for the statues. Where the sources disagree, this page says so.