Menhit

The soot came off in the end. Conservators at Esna spent years on the hypostyle hall with sponges, scalpels and toothpicks, lifting two thousand years of lamp smoke and bird mess off the sandstone, and when the last of it went the colours underneath turned out to be hot ones: yellow and red where the ceilings at Dendara had gone white and pale blue. Among the figures that came back up out of the black was a woman with a lioness’s head, a sun disc riding between her ears, a cobra rearing at the front of it. She is the reason a Roman emperor is shown on that wall with his heels off the ground.

Her name is not subtle. The Egyptians wrote it mnhyt, and it is generally read as “she who massacres” or “she who slaughters,” which is unusually direct even by the standards of a pantheon that liked its epithets literal. She did not begin in Egypt. Menhit came north out of Nubia, a lioness of war among the gods of Kush, and she arrived carrying the sun with her: the earliest Egyptian material treats her as a tutelary and solar power, and she is already working in that register in the Coffin Texts. Egypt took her in without softening her.

The lioness shape is the one constant. There is no bird form, no cow form, no gentle alternative version kept in reserve for festivals. Every image gives the same thing: the long feline skull, the ears set wide, the heavy shoulders under a woman’s linen, and above it the disc and the uraeus. That last detail matters more than it looks. Menhit was one of the goddesses who could serve as the cobra on the royal crown, the small coiled thing at the front of the headdress whose entire job was to spit fire at whatever came at the man wearing it. A king walked around with her on his forehead.

She also walked in front of him. The oldest description of her function has her advancing ahead of the Egyptian columns and shooting down the enemy with arrows of fire, a habit she shares with several other solar goddesses and performs with more enthusiasm than most. Picture the practical version of that: dust, the creak of harness, a line of infantry moving up behind a goddess nobody can see, and the belief among every man in it that the first casualties on the other side will already be down before anyone throws a spear.

Where she came from within the divine order is told more than one way. Some accounts fold her into the myth of the Distant Goddess, the tale in which the Eye of Ra storms off from Egypt and goes south into Nubia, where she takes the form of a lioness and has to be tracked down and coaxed home. In those tellings Menhit is either what the returning goddess becomes or what she gives birth to on arrival. It is a neat piece of theology for a deity everyone knew had come up the river from the south, and it does the useful work of explaining her temper by explaining her homesickness.

Her cult settled in the third nome of Upper Egypt, at the town the Egyptians called Iunyt or Ta-Senet and the Greeks called Latopolis after the Nile perch that swam sacred in its waters. The temple there was the last in Egypt to be decorated with hieroglyphs, and only its hypostyle hall survives: a hall raised under Claudius, still being carved with new scenes two centuries later under Decius, long after the rest of the country had stopped. Its lord was the ram-headed Khnum, who made living things on a potter’s wheel, and its lady was Neith. Menhit stood among them as Khnum’s consort alongside the goddess Nebtu, with the child god Heka, magic itself, counted as their son.

The Esna priests, who were subtle men, did something odd with her. In their scheme Nebtu is the wife and Menhit is what Nebtu becomes: when the goddess loses her temper she takes on the lioness’s face and the lioness’s character, and once she has, she cannot simply be talked round. The texts are specific about what it takes. Streams of blood. Roasted limbs of the enemy. Speared animals. Menhit is not a goddess who receives offerings so much as a condition that has to be fed until it passes.

Which brings us back to the emperor. On one wall of the hall, in a scene catalogued as Esna 520, Trajan is shown dancing in front of Menhit and Nebtu. Dancing pharaohs are almost unknown; five such scenes survive from all the temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, two of them at Esna, and in every single one the man is dancing at an angry goddess to bring her down. So the most powerful person in the world stands in a hot stone room that smells of burnt fat and turns on his feet for a lioness, because the alternative is her.

The columns carried her voice as well as her image. One of them holds a litany written for Menhit in the elaborate acrophonic script the Esna priests invented, where each sign of her name is chosen to spell out a sentence in her praise at the same time as spelling the name, so that reading her out loud was itself an act of flattery. The festival calendar says these litanies were recited in front of the statues. The sound would have gone up into that painted ceiling and come back down off the star vault, and the whole point of it was to keep her pleased.

Her powers follow from what she is. She is solar, so she burns; she is a lioness, so she kills at close range as readily as at bow-shot; she is a uraeus, so she guards a specific person rather than a principle. Set against that, her limits are the limits of pure force. She can be turned aside by ritual, cooled by offerings, and danced quiet by a man with no weapon at all, and she can be absorbed: Egyptian priests identified her with Sekhmet, linked her to Wadjet and Neith in the north, and by the later periods she survives mostly as an aspect of somebody else. Nobody ever wrote her a myth of her own. She has no adventure, no husband-quest, no descent to the underworld and back. What she has instead is a job, a temperature, and a temple full of people working very hard to keep her sweet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Menhit?

Menhit is a lioness-headed goddess of war and the sun, originally Nubian, who was taken into the Egyptian pantheon and worshipped chiefly at Esna in Upper Egypt. Her name is read as “she who massacres” or “she who slaughters.” She was believed to go ahead of Egyptian armies and destroy their enemies with arrows of fire.

Is Menhit Egyptian or Nubian?

Both. Menhit began as a lioness war goddess in Nubia, in the region of the Kingdom of Kush, and moved north into Egyptian worship, where she was fully established as an Egyptian deity without losing that origin. Egyptian sources treat her as a tutelary and solar goddess from an early date, and she appears in that role in the Coffin Texts.

What was Menhit’s role at the temple of Esna?

At Esna she was a consort of the creator god Khnum alongside the goddess Nebtu, with the child god Heka as their son. The Esna priests also treated Menhit as the form the goddess Nebtu took when she became enraged, a shape that could only be pacified with offerings of blood, roasted limbs and speared animals.

Why is a Roman emperor shown dancing in front of Menhit?

The scene catalogued as Esna 520 shows the emperor Trajan dancing before Menhit and Nebtu, and it is one of only about five surviving images of a dancing pharaoh from the Ptolemaic and Roman temples. In every one of them the dance has the same purpose: to calm an angry goddess. Menhit’s temper was dangerous enough that soothing it was treated as a royal duty.

Which other goddess is Menhit connected to?

Menhit was identified with Sekhmet, the best known of Egypt’s lioness goddesses, and she was linked in Lower Egypt with Wadjet and with Neith, who was herself a principal deity at Esna. She was also one of the goddesses who could serve as the protective cobra on the royal crown.

Related Entries

Khnum, Neith, Sekhmet, Wadjet, Tefnut, Shu, Ra, Hathor, Bast (Bastet), Nekhbet, Mafdet, Serket