Anuket

Also Known As: Egyptian Anket or Anqet; Greek Anukis, also Anoukis; the name is usually explained as “the embracer”
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is the goddess of the Nile’s cataracts and of Egypt’s southern border, whose name suggests an embrace that could nurse or crush.
Role in Mythos: First counted a daughter of Ra, she was later drawn into the family of Elephantine as the child of Khnum and Satis, the three of them keeping the place where the flood was thought to enter Egypt.
Relation to Humans: Kings had themselves shown at her breast and gave her the title “mother of the king”, and ordinary Egyptians named their children “beloved of Anukis”. Pharaohs clearing the channel through the rapids at Sehel set up records there in her sight, and her worship ran on through Lower Nubia.

Below Aswan the Nile stops behaving like a river. It breaks on black granite, splits around a scatter of islands and boulders, and for a few miles the water is loud, white and fast. This was the First Cataract, the edge of Egypt proper, and it belonged to a goddess in a crown of feathers.

Her name was Anuket, written Anket or Anqet in Egyptian, and the Greeks turned it into Anukis. Nobody is quite sure what the name means. The usual reading is “the embracer”, and an embrace can go two ways: the arms of a nurse around a child, or a grip that strangles. George Hart and Richard Wilkinson both suggest the ambiguity may be the point, giving her a double temper like that of Hathor, the goddess she was most closely tied to at Thebes. At the cataract that double meaning hardly needs explaining. The same water that fed the whole country could smash a boat on the rocks.

She is easy to pick out in a temple relief. Anuket is a woman in a plain sheath dress, and on her head sits a low crown from which a row of tall plumes rises, bound together, sometimes trailing streamers behind or carrying a cobra at the brow. Hart describes the plumes as ostrich feathers springing from a modius, a flat-topped cap. In her hands she holds the ankh and often a papyrus sceptre. Her sacred animal was the gazelle, the quick, slender antelope of the desert edges, and artists sometimes set one beside her or used the animal to stand for her. A bronze figure now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, in the collection since before 1824, shows her seated in that feathered crown. Her hands and legs are gone.

Her origins are older than her family. She was worshipped from at least the Old Kingdom, and in the earliest stage she was called a daughter of Ra, the sun god. Only later was she folded into the household of the cataract. At Elephantine, the island opposite Aswan, the ram-headed god Khnum ruled the waters with the goddess Satis, and Anuket became their child. The accounts do not agree on when this happened. Wilkinson places it in the Middle Kingdom; Hart and Margaret Bunson say it was not until the New Kingdom that she took the part of the divine child. Either way, the three of them ended up as the family of the cataract, worshipped together at Elephantine and Aswan.

The question of where she came from before that is also open. Bunson calls her probably Nubian in origin. Hart argues the reverse: that for all her close ties to Lower Nubia she was not an imported goddess but an Egyptian idea of a deity who watched the land beyond their southern frontier. Both readings fit a goddess who stood exactly on the border and faced both ways.

Her own island was Sehel, a little south of Aswan in the middle of the rapids. Bunson and Wilkinson both record a temple to her there. Sehel was also a working place. The kings of the Middle Kingdom cut and recut a channel through the cataract to get their boats and soldiers south into Nubia, and Senwosret III left inscriptions on the rocks of the island recording the work; Bunson reports that the records at Sehel credit him with a chapel to Anuket as well. On an ordinary day the scene is not hard to put together from those rocks: a line of boats hauled up through the channel against the current, the crews working ropes over wet stone, and the goddess of the place watching from her island as another expedition passed into the south.

The best known inscription on Sehel is not about her, but she is in it. The Famine Stela is a large text cut into a granite boulder in the Ptolemaic period, though it claims to be a record from the reign of King Djoser, some two thousand years earlier. It tells of seven years without a proper flood. Grain ran short, and the king turned to his wise man Imhotep, who found in the old books that the water rose at Elephantine, from a place called the Twin Caverns, “the breasts that nourish all”, where the Nile god Hapi slept until his season. Khnum, the text says, controlled the doors of that flood. In Heinrich Brugsch’s 1891 translation, the stela lists the gods of Khnum’s temple, and among them, after Satis, is the goddess Anukis. She has no speech and no scene. She is simply there, one of the powers of the place where the river was thought to begin, and the king’s gifts to Khnum’s temple are gifts to her household too.

Her role toward the king was maternal, and the artists made that literal. In the small rock-cut temple of Ramesses II at Beit el-Wali in Lower Nubia she is shown suckling the pharaoh, and she could carry the epithet “mother of the king”. Her worship ran through most of Lower Nubia. A block from the temple of Dakka, carved in the Ptolemaic period, still shows her in the feathered crown.

She was not only a goddess of priests and kings. Egyptians gave their children names such as “beloved of Anukis”, for boys and girls both. In the Late Period she was also linked with Nephthys, the sister of Isis, and when the Greeks came to Egypt they matched her with Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. It is a strange pairing on the face of it: a still fire in the middle of a house, set against a river breaking over rocks.

Her power was the power of the border. She kept the point where Egypt ended and the south began, and the place where the flood was believed to arrive, and she held the living king as a mother holds a child. Her limits are written into that same geography. She never became a great state goddess with a temple in every city. She belonged to the cataract, and away from it she was usually a member of someone else’s family: Ra’s daughter first, then the child of Khnum and Satis. No surviving myth gives her a quarrel, a journey or a death. What survives is a crown of feathers, a gazelle, an island in the rapids and a grip that could go either way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anuket in Egyptian mythology?

Anuket, called Anukis by the Greeks, is the Egyptian goddess of the First Cataract of the Nile and of Egypt’s southern border near Aswan. She was worshipped at Elephantine, at Aswan and especially on the island of Sehel, and throughout much of Lower Nubia.

Who are Anuket’s parents?

In the earliest tradition Anuket was called a daughter of the sun god Ra. Later she was made the child of Khnum and Satis in the divine family of Elephantine. Wilkinson dates that change to the Middle Kingdom, while Hart and Bunson place it in the New Kingdom.

What does Anuket look like?

Anuket is shown as a woman wearing a low crown topped with a row of bound plumes, usually described as ostrich feathers. She often holds an ankh and a papyrus sceptre. Her sacred animal is the gazelle, which sometimes appears beside her.

What does the name Anuket mean?

The name Anuket is usually explained as “the embracer”. Egyptologists note that the embrace could be read as a mother’s hold or as a strangling grip, which may point to a double nature like Hathor’s.

Is Anuket mentioned in the Famine Stela?

Yes. The Famine Stela on Sehel Island, a Ptolemaic inscription set in the reign of King Djoser, lists the gods of Khnum’s temple, and Anuket appears there under her Greek name Anukis after the goddess Satis. The stela tells of a seven-year failure of the Nile flood that ends when the king honours Khnum.