Wadjet

Heat lifts off the Delta mud in the late afternoon and the papyrus rattles at any movement, stems standing taller than a man, close-packed, green for miles in every direction. A hunting party could pass an arm’s length from a hidden child and never know. That marsh is Wadjet’s country, and it explains most of what she is: a goddess of standing water and green reeds who spent three thousand years riding the forehead of the most powerful man on earth, hood flared, mouth open.

Her name is a colour. It comes from the Egyptian word for green, the same green as fresh papyrus and new growth, and she was the Green One long before anyone wrote down why. Her city was Per-Wadjet, the House of Wadjet, which the Greeks shortened to Buto and which lies today under the mounds of Tell el-Fara’in in the northwestern Delta. It was two towns before it was one, Pe and Dep, both named in the Pyramid Texts, and people had been living on that ground for centuries before the first pharaoh. In the religious geography of early Egypt, Buto was the north’s answer to Hierakonpolis in the south. Whatever Upper Egypt had, the Delta matched, and the Delta’s match was a snake.

The other half of the arrangement was Nekhbet, the vulture goddess of Nekheb far upriver. Together they were the Two Ladies, and the pairing hardened into one of the five great names a king carried. The nebty name is written with a vulture and a cobra, each standing on a basket, and it belongs to the First Dynasty; the two goddesses appear together on a tablet from a mastaba at Naqada in the reign of Aha, and Semerkhet is the first king known to have used the title outright. This was not decoration. A pharaoh who claimed both women claimed both halves of the country, and he made the claim on his own head, in gold, where nobody could miss it.

In art she rears with the hood spread, sometimes coiled around a papyrus stalk, sometimes a woman with a cobra’s head under the Red Crown of the north. As one of the forms taken by the Eye of Ra she changes shape entirely and becomes a lioness-headed woman with the sun disc above her. Her most familiar form, though, is her smallest. The rearing cobra fastened to the front of a royal headdress, what the Greeks called the uraeus, is Wadjet reduced to a hand’s breadth of worked gold and inlay, cold against the brow at dawn and hot by noon. In procession it went wherever the king went, an inch above his eyes, aimed outward at the crowd.

Her beginning is the marsh itself. The Pyramid Texts have the first papyrus growing out of her, and one strand of the tradition credits her with making the swamps rather than merely living in them. She did not arrive somewhere and take it over. She is the place set upright and given a mouth, and the growth of green things in shallow water is her business as much as the defence of thrones.

The story that fixed her in the wider mythology is not her own. When Isis bore Horus and had to keep him from Set, she carried him into the Delta, into a papyrus thicket at a place called Chemmis, and Wadjet was among the goddesses who kept him there. Some accounts have her nursing the child, others simply hiding him, which in that landscape amounts to the same service. The scene is domestic and appalling at once: a woman crouched in the reeds with an infant, water to the knee, insects, the flat green smell of stagnant water, and somewhere out on the open ground a god with a hunting party looking for a boy he means to kill. The snake in the reeds was on the child’s side.

Buto stayed important long enough for foreigners to write it down. Herodotus reached it in the fifth century BC and described a temple of the goddess he understood as Leto, with an inner shrine whose walls were each cut from a single stone, forty cubits long and forty high. He was told the oracle there was the most truthful in Egypt. He was also shown a deep lake beside the temple with an island in it, Chemmis, planted with palms and other trees, and assured by the Egyptians that the island floated, the ground having come loose when the goddess took the infant Apollo from Isis and sheltered him there. Herodotus, to his credit, recorded exactly what he saw. It did not float.

What she does follows from what she is. The uraeus was held to spit fire at the king’s enemies, which is a cobra’s own defence conscripted into statecraft and loaned to a man. As a form of the Eye of Ra she carried the sun’s violence, the part of the sun that kills rather than the part that ripens. Women in labour called on her, on the reasonable logic that a goddess who had hidden Horus could be asked to mind somebody else’s newborn. In the Book of the Dead she is turned against the enemies of the deceased and destroys them in the underworld, which is the same work performed in a different country.

Her limits are the limits of that position. Wadjet has almost no myth cycle of her own. No consort worth the name, no birth story that stayed fixed, no long narrative in which she is the one things happen to; she enters other people’s stories, does something useful, and leaves. Her power runs through the office of kingship, which means it depends on there being a king to wear her and a north worth claiming. And her reach was always geographical before it was anything else. She was a Delta goddess who became a national one because the Delta was half the nation, and when the throne fell to outsiders her shrine took the consequences. The temple that survives in the ground at Buto was raised in the Saite period, wrecked by the Persians, and put back up by the early Ptolemies. The site still gives up its contents slowly. Recent survey work at Tell el-Fara’in, combining satellite radar with electrical imaging of the subsoil, has traced buildings lying metres down in the mud she was said to have made.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Wadjet in Egyptian mythology?

Wadjet is the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt and the protector of its kings. She was worshipped at Per-Wadjet, the Delta city the Greeks called Buto, and her name comes from the Egyptian word for green, after the papyrus marshes she was believed to have made. She is best known as the rearing cobra worn on the front of the pharaoh’s headdress.

What is the uraeus?

The uraeus is the rearing cobra fixed to the front of an Egyptian royal headdress, and it represents Wadjet. It marked the king’s authority over Lower Egypt and was believed to spit fire at his enemies. The design shows the snake with its hood spread, facing outward from the wearer’s brow.

Who are the Two Ladies of ancient Egypt?

The Two Ladies are Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, and Nekhbet, the vulture goddess of Upper Egypt. Together they form the nebty name, one of the five great titles a pharaoh carried, written with a vulture and a cobra each standing on a basket. The title appears from the First Dynasty and signalled the king’s rule over both halves of the country.

What did Wadjet do for Horus?

Wadjet helped shelter the infant Horus in the papyrus marshes at Chemmis in the Delta while Isis kept him hidden from Set. Some accounts have her nursing the child as well as concealing him. This is the episode that most firmly attaches Wadjet to the wider Osiris story, in which she otherwise plays little part.

Where was Wadjet worshipped?

Wadjet’s cult centre was Per-Wadjet, the House of Wadjet, formed from the twin towns of Pe and Dep and known to the Greeks as Buto. The site is now Tell el-Fara’in in the northwestern Nile Delta and was occupied from Predynastic times onward. Herodotus visited its temple and described an inner shrine whose walls were each a single block of stone.

Related Entries

Nekhbet, Horus, Isis, Set, Osiris, Ra, Sekhmet, Hathor, Bast (Bastet), Neith, Nephthys, Apep/Apophis, Maat, Taweret