Eye of Horus

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This article is about the ancient Egyptian symbol. For the video game, see Eye of Horus (video game).

The left wedjat eye, symbolizing the Eye of Horus

The Eye of Horus, also known as left wedjat eye or udjat eye, specular to the Eye of Ra (right wedjat eye), is a concept and symbol in ancient Egyptian religion that represents well-being, healing, and protection. It derives from the mythical conflict between the god Horus with his rival Set, in which Set tore out or destroyed one or both of Horus's eyes and the eye was subsequently healed or returned to Horus with the assistance of another deity, such as Thoth. Horus subsequently offered the eye to his deceased father Osiris, and its revitalizing power sustained Osiris in the afterlife. The Eye of Horus was thus equated with funerary offerings, as well as with all the offerings given to deities in temple ritual. It could also represent other concepts, such as the moon, whose waxing and waning was likened to the injury and restoration of the eye.

The Eye of Horus symbol, a stylized eye with distinctive markings, was believed to have

stelae and on the bows of boats. To some extent the symbol was adopted by the people of regions neighboring Egypt, such as Syria, Canaan, and especially Nubia
.

The eye symbol was also rendered as a hieroglyph (𓂀). Egyptologists have long believed that hieroglyphs representing pieces of the symbol stand for fractions in ancient Egyptian mathematics, although this hypothesis has been challenged.

Origins

Amulet from the tomb of Tutankhamun, fourteenth century BC, incorporating the Eye of Horus beneath a disk and crescent symbol representing the moon[1]

The

ancient Egyptian god Horus was a sky deity, and many Egyptian texts say that Horus's right eye was the sun and his left eye the moon.[2] The solar eye and lunar eye were sometimes equated with the red and white crown of Egypt, respectively.[3] Some texts treat the Eye of Horus seemingly interchangeably with the Eye of Ra,[4] which in other contexts is an extension of the power of the sun god Ra and is often personified as a goddess.[5] The Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson believes the two eyes of Horus gradually became distinguished as the lunar Eye of Horus and the solar Eye of Ra.[6] Other Egyptologists, however, argue that no text clearly equates the eyes of Horus with the sun and moon until the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC);[7] Rolf Krauss argues that the Eye of Horus originally represented Venus as the morning star and evening star and only later became equated with the moon.[8]

Katja Goebs argues that the myths surrounding the Eye of Horus and the Eye of Ra are based around the same mytheme, or core element of a myth, and that "rather than postulating a single, original myth of one cosmic body, which was then merged with others, it might be more fruitful to think in terms of a (flexible) myth based on the structural relationship of an Object that is missing, or located far from its owner". In the myths surrounding the Eye of Ra, the goddess flees Ra and is brought back by another deity. In the case of the Eye of Horus, the eye is usually missing because of Horus's conflict with his arch-rival, the god Set, in their struggle for the kingship of Egypt after the death of Horus's father Osiris.[9]

Mythology

Further information: Osiris myth § Conflict of Horus and Set
Figurine of Thoth, in the form of a baboon, holding the wedjat eye, seventh to fourth century BC

The

Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BC), Horus's mother Isis waters the buried pair of eyes, causing them to grow into the first grape vines.[15]

The restoration of the eye was often referred to as "filling" the eye. Hathor filled Horus's eye sockets with the gazelle's milk,[16] while texts from temples of the Greco-Roman era said that Thoth, together with a group of fourteen other deities, filled the eye with specific plants and minerals.[17] The process of filling the Eye of Horus was likened to the waxing of the moon, and the fifteen deities in the Greco-Roman texts represented the fifteen days from the new moon to the full moon.[17]

The Egyptologist Herman te Velde suggests that the Eye of Horus is linked with another episode in the conflict between the two gods, in which Set subjects Horus to a sexual assault and, in retaliation, Isis and Horus cause Set to ingest Horus's semen. This episode is narrated most clearly in "The Contendings of Horus and Set", in which Horus's semen appears on Set's forehead as a golden disk, which Thoth places on his own head. Other references in Egyptian texts imply that in some versions of the myth it was Thoth himself who came forth from Set's head after Set was impregnated by Horus's semen, and a passage in the Pyramid Texts says the Eye of Horus came from Set's forehead. Te Velde argues that the disk that emerges from Set's head is the Eye of Horus. If so, the episodes of mutilation and sexual abuse would form a single story, in which Set assaults Horus and loses semen to him, Horus retaliates and impregnates Set, and Set comes into possession of Horus's eye when it appears on Set's head. Because Thoth is a moon deity in addition to his other functions, it would make sense, according to te Velde, for Thoth to emerge in the form of the eye and step in to make peace between the feuding deities.[18]

Beginning in the New Kingdom,[17] the Eye of Horus was known as the wḏꜣt (often rendered as wedjat or udjat), meaning the "whole", "completed", or "uninjured" eye.[3][19] It is unclear whether the term wḏꜣt refers to the eye that was destroyed and restored, or to the one that Set left unharmed.[20]

A personified Eye of Horus offers incense to the enthroned god Osiris in a painting from the tomb of Pashedu, thirteenth century BC[1]

Upon becoming king after Set's defeat, Horus gives offerings to his deceased father, thus reviving and sustaining him in the afterlife. This act was the mythic prototype for the offerings to the dead that were a major part of

ancient Egyptian funerary customs. It also influenced the conception of offering rites that were performed on behalf of deities in temples.[21] Among the offerings Horus gives is his own eye, which Osiris consumes. The eye, as part of Osiris's son, is ultimately derived from Osiris himself. Therefore, the eye in this context represents the Egyptian conception of offerings. The gods were responsible for the existence of all the goods that they were offered, so offerings were part of the gods' own substance. In receiving offerings, deities were replenished by their own life force, as Osiris was when he consumed the Eye of Horus. In the Egyptian worldview, life was a force that originated with the gods and circulated through the world, so that by returning this force to the gods, offering rites maintained the flow of life.[22][23] The offering of the eye to Osiris is another instance of the mytheme in which a deity in need receives an eye and is restored to well-being.[24] The eye's restorative power meant the Egyptians considered it a symbol of protection against evil, in addition to its other meanings.[20]

In ritual

Offerings and festivals

In the Osiris myth the offering of the Eye of Horus to Osiris was the prototype of all funerary offerings, and indeed of all offering rites, as the human giving an offering to a deity was likened to Horus and the deity receiving it was likened to Osiris.[25] Moreover, the Egyptian word for "eye", jrt, resembled jrj, the word for "act", and through wordplay the Eye of Horus could thus be equated with any ritual act. For these reasons, the Eye of Horus symbolized all the sustenance given to the gods in the temple cult.[26] The versions of the myth in which flowers or grapevines grow from the buried eyes reinforce the eye's relationship with ritual offerings, as the perfumes, food, and drink that were derived from these plants were commonly used in offering rites.[27] The eye was often equated with maat, the Egyptian concept of cosmic order, which was dependent on the continuation of the temple cult and could likewise be equated with offerings of any kind.[23]

The Egyptians observed several festivals in the course of each month that were based on the phases of the moon, such as the Blacked-out Moon Festival (the first of the month), the Monthly Festival (the second day), and the Half-Month Festival. During these festivals, living people gave offerings to the deceased. The festivals were frequently mentioned in funerary texts. Beginning in the time of the Coffin Texts from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC), funerary texts parallel the progression of these festivals, and hence the waxing of the moon, with the healing of the Eye of Horus.[28]

Healing texts

Ancient Egyptian medicine involved both practical treatments and rituals that invoked divine powers, and Egyptian medical papyri do not clearly distinguish the two. Healing rituals frequently equate patients with Horus, so the patient may be healed as Horus was in myth.[29] For this reason, the Eye of Horus is frequently mentioned in such spells. The Hearst papyrus, for instance, equates the physician performing the ritual to "Thoth, the physician of the Eye of Horus" and equates the instrument with which the physician measures the medicine with "the measure with which Horus measured his eye". The Eye of Horus was particularly invoked as protection against eye disease.[30] One text, Papyrus Leiden I 348, equates each part of a person's body with a deity in order to protect it. The left eye is equated with the Eye of Horus.[31]

Symbol

Shard of a faience throwing stick painted with the wedjat eye

Horus was represented as a falcon, such as a lanner or peregrine falcon, or as a human with a falcon head.[32] The Eye of Horus is a stylized human or falcon eye. The symbol often includes an eyebrow, a dark line extending behind the rear corner of the eye, a cheek marking below the center or forward corner of the eye, and a line extending below and toward the rear of the eye that ends in a curl or spiral. The cheek marking resembles that found on many falcons. The Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson suggests that the curling line is derived from the facial markings of the cheetah, which the Egyptians associated with the sky because the spots in its coat were likened to stars.[1]

The stylized eye symbol was used interchangeably to represent the Eye of Ra. Egyptologists often simply refer to this symbol as the wedjat eye.[33]

Amulets

A variety of wedjat eye amulets

Amulets in the shape of the wedjat eye first appeared in the late Old Kingdom and continued to be produced up to Roman times.

mummies, and it remained in widespread use over the next two thousand years, even as the number and variety of funerary amulets greatly increased. Up until the New Kingdom, funerary wedjat amulets tended to be placed on the chest, whereas during and after the New Kingdom they were commonly placed over the incision through which the body's internal organs had been removed during the mummification process.[34]

Wedjat amulets were made from a wide variety of materials, including

Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070–664 BC) saw still more complex designs, in which multiple small figures of animals or deities were inserted in the gaps between the parts of the eye, or in which the eyes were grouped into sets of four.[35]

The eye symbol could also be incorporated into larger pieces of jewelry alongside other protective symbols, such as the ankh and djed signs and various emblems of deities.[37] Beginning in the thirteenth century BC, glass beads bearing eye-like spots were strung on necklaces together with wedjat amulets, which may be the origin of the modern nazar, a type of bead meant to ward off the evil eye.[38]

Sometimes temporary amulets were created for protective purposes in especially dangerous situations, such as illness or childbirth. Rubrics for ritual spells often instruct the practitioner to draw the wedjat eye on linen or papyrus to serve as a temporary amulet.[39]

  • Wedjat amulet with a cobra, Cairo Museum
    Wedjat amulet with a cobra,
    Cairo Museum
  • Amulet of the wedjat with the goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet
    Amulet of the wedjat with the goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet
  • Wedjat amulet with a cobra and the wing and legs of a bird
    Wedjat amulet with a cobra and the wing and legs of a bird

Other uses

Wedjat eyes appeared in a wide variety of contexts in Egyptian art. Coffins of the

Stelae, or carved stone slabs, were often inscribed with wedjat eyes. In some periods of Egyptian history, only deities or kings could be portrayed directly beneath the winged sun symbol that often appeared in the lunettes of stelae, and Eyes of Horus were placed above figures of common people.[40] The symbol could also be incorporated into tattoos, as demonstrated by the mummy of a woman from the late New Kingdom that was decorated with elaborate tattoos, including several wedjat eyes.[41]

Some cultures neighboring Egypt adopted the wedjat symbol for use in their own art. Some Egyptian artistic motifs became widespread in art from

Middle Bronze Age. Art of this era sometimes incorporated the wedjat, though it was much more rare than other Egyptian symbols such as the ankh.[42] In contrast, the wedjat appeared frequently in art of the Kingdom of Kush in Nubia, in the first millennium BC and early first millennium AD, demonstrating Egypt's heavy influence upon Kush.[43] Down to the present day, eyes are painted on the bows of ships in many Mediterranean countries, a custom that may descend from the use of the wedjat eye on boats.[44]

  • Wedjat eyes on the coffin of Irinimenpu, twentieth to seventeenth century BC
    Wedjat eyes on the coffin of Irinimenpu, twentieth to seventeenth century BC
  • Winged wedjat eyes on the coffin of Henettawy, tenth century BC
    Winged wedjat eyes on the coffin of Henettawy, tenth century BC
  • Wedjat eyes atop the stela of Uhemmenu, sixteenth century BC
    Wedjat eyes atop the stela of Uhemmenu, sixteenth century BC
  • Crown from the post-Meroitic period in Nubia, c. 350–600 AD, incorporating multiple wedjat eyes
    Crown from the post-Meroitic period in Nubia, c. 350–600 AD, incorporating multiple wedjat eyes

Hieroglyphic form

D10
wedjat or Eye of Horus
in hieroglyphs
Gardiner: D10

A

hieroglyphic version of the wedjat symbol, labeled D10 in the list of hieroglyphic signs drawn up by the Egyptologist Alan Gardiner, was used in writing as a determinative or ideogram for the Eye of Horus.[45]

The Egyptians sometimes used signs that represented pieces of the wedjat eye hieroglyph. In 1911, the Egyptologist

Egyptian Grammar by Alan Gardiner. Gardiner's treatment of the subject suggested that the parts of the eye were used to represent fractions because in myth the eye was torn apart by Set and later made whole. Egyptologists accepted Gardiner's interpretation for decades afterward.[46]

Jim Ritter, a historian of science and mathematics, analyzed the shape of the hieratic signs through Egyptian history in 2002. He concluded that "the further back we go the further the hieratic signs diverge from their supposed Horus-eye counterparts", thus undermining Möller's hypothesis. He also reexamined the votive cubits and argued that they do not clearly equate the Eye of Horus signs with the hieratic fractions, so even Peet's weaker form of the hypothesis was unlikely to be correct.

James P. Allen's Middle Egyptian, an introductory book on the Egyptian language, still lists the pieces of the wedjat eye as representing fractions of a hekat.[45]

The hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus is listed in the Egyptian Hieroglyphs block of the Unicode standard for encoding symbols in computing, as U+13080 (𓂀). The hieroglyphs for parts of the eye (𓂁, 𓂂, 𓂃, 𓂄, 𓂅, 𓂆, 𓂇) are listed as U+13081 through U+13087.[48]


Character information
Preview 𓂀 𓂁 𓂂 𓂃 𓂄 𓂅 𓂆 𓂇
Unicode name EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D010 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D011 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D012 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D013 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D014 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D015 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D016 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D017
Encodings decimal hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex
Unicode 77952 U+13080 77953 U+13081 77954 U+13082 77955 U+13083 77956 U+13084 77957 U+13085 77958 U+13086 77959 U+13087
UTF-8 240 147 130 128 F0 93 82 80 240 147 130 129 F0 93 82 81 240 147 130 130 F0 93 82 82 240 147 130 131 F0 93 82 83 240 147 130 132 F0 93 82 84 240 147 130 133 F0 93 82 85 240 147 130 134 F0 93 82 86 240 147 130 135 F0 93 82 87
UTF-16 55308 56448 D80C DC80 55308 56449 D80C DC81 55308 56450 D80C DC82 55308 56451 D80C DC83 55308 56452 D80C DC84 55308 56453 D80C DC85 55308 56454 D80C DC86 55308 56455 D80C DC87
Numeric character reference 𓂀 𓂀 𓂁 𓂁 𓂂 𓂂 𓂃 𓂃 𓂄 𓂄 𓂅 𓂅 𓂆 𓂆 𓂇 𓂇

Citations

  1. ^ a b c Wilkinson 1992, pp. 42–43.
  2. ^ Wilkinson 1992, pp. 43, 83.
  3. ^ a b Pinch 2002, p. 131.
  4. ^ Krauss 2002, pp. 193–194.
  5. ^ Pinch 2002, pp. 64, 128.
  6. ^ a b Wilkinson 1992, p. 43.
  7. ^ a b Eaton 2011, p. 238.
  8. ^ Krauss 2002, pp. 193–195.
  9. ^ Goebs 2002, pp. 45, 57.
  10. ^ Pinch 2002, pp. 9, 11.
  11. ^ Griffiths 1960, p. 1.
  12. ^ Griffiths 1960, pp. 2–4.
  13. ^ a b Pinch 2002, pp. 131–132.
  14. ^ Griffiths 1960, pp. 30–31.
  15. ^ Turner 2013, pp. 55–56.
  16. ^ Eaton 2011, p. 239.
  17. ^ a b c Kaper 2001, p. 481.
  18. ^ te Velde 1967, pp. 43–46.
  19. ^ Faulkner 1991, pp. 74–75.
  20. ^ a b c Andrews 1994, p. 43.
  21. ^ Assmann 2001, pp. 50–51.
  22. ^ Frandsen 1989, pp. 97–98.
  23. ^ a b Shafer 1997, pp. 23–24.
  24. ^ Goebs 2002, pp. 46–47.
  25. ^ Assmann 2001, pp. 49–50.
  26. ^ Lorton 1999, pp. 136–137.
  27. ^ Pinch 2002, p. 132.
  28. ^ Eaton 2011, pp. 232, 238–239.
  29. ^ Pinch 2006, pp. 133–135, 140.
  30. ^ Griffiths 1960, pp. 33–34.
  31. ^ Pinch 2006, p. 142.
  32. ^ Bailleul-LeSuer 2012, pp. 33, 174.
  33. ^ Pinch 2006, p. 29.
  34. ^ Ikram & Dodson 1998, pp. 138–140, 143.
  35. ^ a b Andrews 1994, p. 44.
  36. ^ Darnell1997, pp. 36–38.
  37. ^ Pinch 2006, pp. 111, 116.
  38. ^ Potts 1982, pp. 20–25.
  39. ^ Pinch 2006, pp. 105, 110.
  40. ^ Robins 2008, pp. 143–144.
  41. ^ Watson 2016.
  42. ^ Teissier 1996, pp. xii, 49.
  43. ^ Elhassan 2004, p. 13.
  44. ^ Potts 1982, p. 19.
  45. ^ a b Allen 2014, p. 472.
  46. ^ Ritter 2002, pp. 297–302, 307.
  47. ^ Ritter 2002, pp. 306, 309–311.
  48. ^ Unicode 2020.

Works cited

Further reading

External links
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