Apedemak

Also Known As: lion god of the Kushite kingdom of Meroe; called “lord of Aborepe”, the ancient name of Musawwarat es-Sufra, and “Lion of the south, strong of arm” in his temple hymns
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Nubian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is a war god of the Meroitic kingdom whose lion form stands for royal strength, military victory and the defeat of the king’s enemies.
Role in Mythos: He was the great native god of Meroitic Kush, the first local deity to receive a temple of his own, and a divine partner of the kings and queens who built for him.
Relation to Humans: Meroitic rulers had themselves carved offering to him and called themselves his beloved, so that his favour stood behind their right to rule. His temples in the Butana steppe drew worshippers far from the Nile, though how ordinary people honoured him outside the temples is poorly understood.

The temple stands alone in the scrub of the Butana, a sandstone box the colour of dry bread under a white sky, some distance from the Nile and with nothing around it but low hills and thorn. Two stone lions once kept its door. Inside, on the walls, a god with a lion’s head receives a king.

His name is Apedemak, and he belonged to Kush, the kingdom that grew up along the Nile south of Egypt and lasted, in one form or another, from about 760 BCE to about 350 CE. In its later centuries, when the royal seat had moved south to Meroe in what is now Sudan, the Kushites worshipped plenty of gods they had taken from Egypt. Amun had his great temples. Isis and Hathor were honoured. Apedemak was something else. George Hart, in his dictionary of Egyptian gods, calls him likely a totally African deity, and no counterpart to him turns up in Egyptian religion at all.

Where he came from is a question with no tidy answer. The archaeologist Elizabeth Minor puts it plainly: Apedemak grew out of a long Nubian history of lion deities whose names are lost. Lions had been part of the imagery of the region for a very long time before anyone carved his name. What can be dated is the moment he steps into stone. Around 235 to 218 BCE, King Arnekhamani built him a temple at Musawwarat es-Sufra, in the steppe east of the Nile, and it is the first known Meroitic temple raised for a local god rather than for one of the Egyptian imports. On its walls Apedemak appears alongside two other native gods, Sebiumeker and Arensnuphis, and all three are shown there for the first time. One of the temple’s hymns calls him lord of Aborepe, the ancient name of the place, which suggests he was already worshipped there before the king arrived with his masons.

The hymns are written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the old sacred script of the Nile, and they give the god the titles a Kushite king wanted to hear. The hymn on the south wall names him “Lord of Naqa, great god, Lord of Musawwarat es-Sufra, excellent god, the foremost of Nubia; Lion of the south, strong of arm.” The last phrase is the whole character of the god in five words.

He looks the part. Most often he has a man’s body and a lion’s head, the mane heavy around the face, and sometimes he is simply a lion. Hart describes him holding a sceptre topped by a seated lion. In the temple reliefs he carries a bow for striking down enemies, or holds captives on a rope, their arms bound. One of the scenes the walls return to is almost routine: the king stands before the god with an offering in his hands, and the lion-headed figure receives it, calm and upright, while the captives he has already taken wait at the end of his arm. On the back wall of the Musawwarat temple Arnekhamani himself stands with Apedemak and Sebiumeker. The god’s company and the king’s company were meant to look like the same company.

The temple did not stand for long. It collapsed in antiquity, and its walls lay in the sand until the German archaeologist Fritz Hintze put them back up in 1969 and 1970. It now wears a modern roof. Around it spreads the rest of Musawwarat, including the vast maze of walls and ramps called the Great Enclosure, and a great many images of elephants. Hart records that the reliefs point to a cult that involved specially bred temple cattle and a serious regard for the African elephant, and the heat and the silence of the place make it easy to believe the animals were once the loudest things in it. Hart also describes the complex as a place of pilgrimage.

The god travelled. Apedemak was mainly a southern deity, and mentions of him in Lower Nubia are rare, which makes the exceptions stand out. At Dabod, just above the First Cataract, in a chapel built for Isis, the Meroitic ruler Adikhalamani called himself “beloved of Apedemak” around 200 BCE. At Meroe itself there was a temple of Apedemak alongside the temple of Amun. And at Naqa, a desert town south of the capital, the royal pair Natakamani and Amanitore built him a temple in the first century CE that became the most famous monument of his cult.

Naqa is where Apedemak stops looking like anyone else. On the rear wall of that temple he appears at his largest, receiving offerings from the king and queen, and he has three lion heads and four arms. On the edges of the building he takes another form again: a lion-headed serpent rising out of a lotus flower, with a human upper body, coiled like something from a dream. Neither shape has a known parallel elsewhere. On the side walls he keeps company with Amun and Horus, and the goddess Amesemi, his consort, appears among the goddesses on the temple’s north side.

No story about him survives. There is no birth, no battle with a monster, no death and return, nothing that would count as a myth in the Greek or Egyptian sense. What survives is a god’s job description, cut into temple walls and repeated in stone. He made kings strong and he made their enemies small. Minor stresses how central that link between the lion and the king was, and how double-edged: the lion was dangerous, and the whole point of the god was that the king could claim that danger as his own and keep it under control. Kushite gold shows him too, on a ring from the kingdom, which means his face was worn on the hand as well as carved on the wall.

His power was power over war and over the throne, and it followed from the animal he was. A lion does not negotiate. Apedemak’s limits followed from the same place. He was a god of the Meroitic state and of the southern heartland, and the further one travels from the Butana the thinner his traces become. The evidence for anyone praying to him outside the temples is slight, a matter of small objects like seals and jewellery that may or may not show him. When the kingdom of Kush faded in the fourth century CE, the lion of the south went with it, and his temples were left to the wind and the sand until Hintze’s workmen lifted the fallen blocks back into place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Apedemak?

Apedemak is the lion god of the ancient Kushite kingdom of Meroe, in present-day Sudan. He was a war god closely tied to kingship and is one of the few major Kushite deities with no Egyptian counterpart. His cult is best known from the temples at Musawwarat es-Sufra and Naqa.

What does Apedemak look like?

Apedemak is usually shown as a man with a lion’s head, and sometimes as a full lion. Temple reliefs show him holding a bow or bound captives, and George Hart describes him with a sceptre topped by a seated lion. At Naqa he also appears with three lion heads and four arms, and as a lion-headed serpent rising from a lotus.

Where was Apedemak worshipped?

Apedemak’s oldest known temple is the Lion Temple at Musawwarat es-Sufra, built by King Arnekhamani around 235 to 218 BCE. His most famous temple is at Naqa, built by Natakamani and Amanitore in the first century CE, and there was also a temple of Apedemak at Meroe. Mentions of him north of the Butana region are rare.

What does the hymn to Apedemak say?

The hymn on the south wall of the Lion Temple at Musawwarat es-Sufra calls Apedemak “Lord of Naqa, great god, Lord of Musawwarat es-Sufra, excellent god, the foremost of Nubia; Lion of the south, strong of arm.” Another hymn there calls him lord of Aborepe, the ancient name of Musawwarat. The hymns are written in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Who is Apedemak’s wife?

Apedemak’s consort is the goddess Amesemi, a native Kushite goddess of the Meroitic period. She appears among the goddesses on the north side of the Lion Temple at Naqa. No myth describing their marriage survives.