Mehet-Weret
An illustration of Mehet-Weret based on a painting from the tomb of Irynefer at Deir el-Medina (TT290)
Name in hieroglyphs
Symbol	Cow, Sun disk
Offspring	Ra, Heka (some accounts)

Mehet-Weret or Mehturt (Ancient Egyptian: mḥt-wrt) is an ancient Egyptian deity of the sky in ancient Egyptian religion. Her name means "Great Flood".

She was mentioned in the Pyramid Texts. In ancient Egyptian creation myths, she gives birth to the sun at the beginning of time. In spell 17 of the Book of the Dead the god Ra is born from her buttocks.^[1] In art she is portrayed as a cow with a sun disk between her horns. She is associated with the goddesses Neith, Hathor, and Isis, all of whom have similar characteristics, and like them she could be called the "Eye of Ra".^[2] In some instances she is simply an epithet for those goddesses.^[1] Her own titles included 'mound' and 'island'.^[1]

Origin

Mehet-Weret was responsible for raising the sun into the sky every day. She produced the light for the crops of those who worshipped her, and she also caused the annual Nile River flood that fertilized the crops with water. In Patricia Monaghan's The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, she describes Mehet-Weret as the goddess of creation because she gives birth to the sun every day, creating life for all those who worship her.^[3]

Geraldine Pinch suggests that Mehet-Weret was also 'probably' the Milky Way in the night sky, to correspond with her identification as the celestial waters travelled by the solar barque.^[1]

Physical description

Mehet-Weret is depicted as either a cow-headed woman, a seated cow, or a cow carrying a child, often the golden disk of the sun is between her horns^[1] She appears on a golden bed found in the Tomb of Tutankhamun, the sides of which are made from star-patterned cows labelled as Isis-Mehet.^[1]

She is also featured twice on the sarcophagus of Khonsu, son of Sennedjem, who was buried in tomb TT1 during the Nineteenth Dynasty.^[4] In both instances she appears as a seated cow with the sun between her horns. She is depicted dressed in a number of ritual items as a way to denote her divine standing; a flail rises out of her back. In one image Khonsu is depicted bowing and adoring her, in the other a small Horus head lies in front of her on her dais.^[5][4]

Death and afterlife

The mystical Spell 17, from the Papyrus of Ani. The vignette illustrates (middle) Mehet-Weret.

The goddess Mehet-Weret was featured in a number of spells in the Book of the Dead, including spell 17. In this spell she was credited for the birth of Re, and she is also the one who protects Re, because it was believed by the ancient people of Egypt that the sun died every day and was reborn by Mehet-Weret. She was responsible for taking him into the underworld, or night because of the darkness, and then bringing him back to the world the next day, almost as if in the afterlife. The people of Egypt believed that Mehet-Weret was a goddess of creation and rebirth, so she was featured in one of the spells to help the humans make their way into the afterlife. The Book of the Dead is an important text in the Egyptian culture because it allows the audience to understand the different journeys that the ancient Egyptians believed in to get to the afterlife.^[6]

References