Nephthys

Two birds hang over a body laid on the wet black earth of the Delta, and the sound coming off their wings is wrong for hunting. It is the kite’s cry, a thin raptor shriek bent until it carries like a woman keening. One bird is Isis. The other, always a little behind her sister and a little quieter, is Nephthys, and the drowned thing on the ground between them is their brother.

Her Egyptian name was Nebet-het, which the scribes wrote with a basket balanced over the sign for a walled house or temple enclosure. Lady of the House. Not a home with a hearth but the sacred precinct, the temple court, and by the long Egyptian habit of imagining death as a kind of architecture, the tomb. She was the last-born of the five children the sky goddess Nut delivered against the will of Ra, after Osiris and Horus the Elder and Set and Isis, the great Ennead of Heliopolis folding shut on her. By the neat symmetry of that generation she was given to Set, the red god of the desert and the storm, as Isis was given to Osiris. The pairing never took. In most tellings she bore Set nothing.

The one child the stories give her came from the wrong bed. The fullest version survives in Greek, in Plutarch, writing centuries later but drawing on Egyptian priests. Osiris, mistaking Nephthys for his own wife in the dark, lay with her, and left behind in her arms a garland of yellow melilote. Isis found the flowers, understood what they meant, and went looking for the child. Nephthys had already abandoned the infant out of terror of what Set would do to it, and Isis tracked the baby down with the help of dogs and raised him herself. The child was Anubis, the jackal who would afterward stand over every embalming table in Egypt. Older Egyptian sources are quieter and less tidy about his parentage, and the motherhood sits loosely on Nephthys, a thing some texts grant her and others hand to another goddess entirely.

Her defining act begins with a murder in the family. When Set trapped Osiris in a coffin and later hacked the drowned body apart and flung the pieces the length of the Nile, Nephthys walked out of her husband’s house and did not go back. She joined Isis, and the two of them worked the marshes and the mud for the scattered parts of their brother. They found them. They knelt at either end of what they had gathered and beat the air with kite’s wings to fan breath back into him long enough for a son to be conceived. The Pyramid Texts, carved inside Fifth and Sixth Dynasty tombs, already name the two mourning birds, the djerti, and set them to draw the sickness out of the dead king and lift him toward the sky. Whatever Nephthys was married to, this was the side she chose.

Out of that grief the Egyptians built her a role. She and Isis became the two women who stand at the head and the foot of every bier, the professional mourners of the divine world, and living women shaved their heads and daubed their arms and played the pair in the temple lamentations. She guarded the embalming house, where Memphis gave her the flat, practical title Queen of the Embalmer’s Shop. When the body was opened and its organs sealed into the four canopic jars, she was one of the goddesses set to watch over them, wrapping her arms around the vessel that held the lungs. Her name was spoken over resin and warm linen and the sharp mineral bite of natron. She is called, without ceremony, the Friend of the Dead.

Seeing her is another matter, because she was rarely allowed a face of her own. In painting she is a slim woman in a sheath dress, and the only sure way to tell her from Isis is the sign balanced on her head, the little basket and house that spell her name, where Isis carries a throne. Sometimes she is a kite outright, or a woman with a falcon’s long barred wings opened over a mummy or a sarcophagus. She belongs to the west, the quarter of the setting sun and the doorway into the land of the dead, and to the night, the dark half of a pair whose brighter half was her sister. No one raised her a great temple of her own.

Her power was her voice and her nearness. The lament that pours out of her is not decoration hung on a funeral but the working thing itself, the cry that reaches down and coaxes a stopped heart back toward motion, the same magic that had briefly quickened Osiris. She could shield a corpse from dissolution, keep the hungry dead at bay, hold open the fragile seam between the body on the table and whatever walked out of it. She was tied as well to childbirth and the muddy business of beginnings, and in some places to beer and the loosening it brings. Her limits are the mirror of all that. She is almost never worshipped alone. Her strength runs through others, through the sister she doubles, the husband she abandons, the brother she mourns, the son she loses. She could help gather Osiris and breathe over him, but she could not be the one to conceive the heir or work the resurrection. She is the second voice in the duet, and the duet fails without her, and it is never quite hers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nephthys?

Nephthys is the ancient Egyptian goddess of mourning, night, and the funerary rites, known in Egyptian as Nebet-het, “Lady of the House.” She is a member of the Ennead of Heliopolis, daughter of the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb, and sister to Isis, Osiris, and Set. Her chief role is helping to mourn and protect the dead, beginning with her murdered brother Osiris.

What is Nephthys the goddess of?

Nephthys presides over mourning, funerary protection, night, and embalming, which earned her the title Friend of the Dead. She and Isis were the two divine mourners who stood at the head and foot of the bier, and Nephthys guarded the embalming house and one of the four canopic jars, the vessel that held the lungs. She was also linked to childbirth and, in some places, to beer.

Is Nephthys the mother of Anubis?

In the fullest surviving version, told by the Greek writer Plutarch, Nephthys is the mother of Anubis by Osiris, who lay with her mistaking her for his wife Isis. Fearing her husband Set, she abandoned the child, and Isis found and raised him. Older Egyptian sources are less consistent about Anubis’s parentage, so the motherhood is not fixed across all traditions.

What is the relationship between Nephthys and Isis?

Nephthys and Isis are sisters and near-constant companions in the funerary tradition, together forming the two mourning kites who wept for Osiris and searched out his scattered body. In art they are often almost identical, distinguished only by the hieroglyph each wears on her head. Nephthys is generally the quieter, darker, more nocturnal of the pair, the second voice to Isis’s lead.

Who is Nephthys married to?

Nephthys is married to Set, the Egyptian god of chaos, the desert, and storms, the same god who murdered their brother Osiris. Despite the marriage, Nephthys sided with Isis and Osiris after the murder, leaving Set’s house to help mourn and restore the slain god. In most tellings she bore Set no children.

Related Entries

Isis, Osiris, Set, Anubis, Horus, Nut, Geb, Ra, Atum, Shu, Serket, Neith, Bennu, Nekhbet