Hathor
The Egyptian goddess of the sky, of women, love, music and drink, first worshipped as a cow. Her symbols are the cow’s horns with the sun disc between them, the sistrum rattle and the menat necklace, and her face with cow’s ears crowns the columns of her temples.
Meaning
Hathor’s name means “House of Horus”, the part of the sky the sun god lived in; Budge (1904) and Erman (1907) both read it that way. Budge counted her among the oldest gods of Egypt: a flint model of a cow’s head and horns, which he calls “her type and symbol”, has been found among late predynastic flints. Egyptian artists drew her in three ways. She could be a cow, her oldest form, kept mostly for funeral scenes; a woman with what Erman calls “a broad kindly woman’s face” and the ears of a cow; or a woman whose headdress “recalls the ancient celestial cow”, two horns with the sun between them. In that last form, Budge writes, she usually carries a sceptre. Erman calls her the goddess whom women worshipped “before all others”, the goddess of pleasure and of love, and Budge puts singers, dancers, beautiful women, artists, wine and beer in her care. The Greeks identified her with Aphrodite. The House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy) honours her today as Hethert, one of the “Names” in which, it teaches, the one god Netjer appears, and gives the cow, the mirror and the sistrum as her symbols.
Origin and history
Budge found that Hathor was identified with every important local goddess, so that “her shrines were even more numerous than those of Horus”. So many forms built up that a selection was made, usually of seven, the Seven Hathors, and the seven worshipped at Dendera were not always the same seven as in other lists. In the “Tale of the Two Brothers” the Seven Hathors come to look at the wife the god Khnum has made for the younger brother, Bata, and say “with one voice” that she will die by the knife; Erman records them coming to every birth to learn what fate the child’s god has given it.
She was also a goddess of the dead. Erman describes her as the goddess of the West, standing on the western mountain to receive the setting sun and the dead. As lady of the underworld, Budge notes, she appears as a cow walking out of the funeral mountain, with the menat on the back of her neck, and in the Book of the Dead the dead ask to eat “under the sycamore tree of my lady Hathor”; it was Hathor as a cow, he writes, who received the dead in the underworld and gave them new life.
Her gentle side has a fierce counterpart in the legend of the destruction of mankind, painted in a small chamber of the tomb of Seti I. In Budge’s 1912 translation the gods tell the sun god Ra that no eye can resist his Eye “when it journeyeth in the form of Hathor”, and she goes out and kills the men and women in the desert. Erman sums it up: Hathor, “the kindly goddess of love”, appears in the legends as “a dreadful goddess who slew the enemies of Re”. Ra saves the survivors by flooding the fields with beer that looks like blood and makes her drunk, and Budge’s text ends with the beer that “make them to sleep” brewed ever after at the festival of Hathor. The story is told in full on the eye of Ra page; who does the killing is on the Sekhmet page.
Why does Hathor wear cow’s horns?
Because she was a cow goddess before she was drawn as a woman. Budge says the cow was her oldest form and lasted in funeral scenes and the Book of the Dead until the Roman period. Erman wrote that the cow form of the goddess of heaven first belonged to Hathor alone, but that a cow’s head did not agree with her later character, so in very early times artists gave her a human face that kept only the cow’s ears, or a woman’s head wearing the horns with the sun between them. The disc is the sun: Budge reads her name as making her “the house in which Horus the Sun-god dwelt”.
The sistrum and the menat
The sistrum, a rattle whose frame above the handle held bars hung with metal discs or loose rods, was “a symbol of the goddess Hathor”, the Global Egyptian Museum says of a faience example in Cairo, “carried and shaken by her priestesses and priests in ceremonies, to appease the goddess”. Erman pictures the priestesses who “clattered and rattled with their sistra” before her. Her head, with cow’s ears, sits between the handle and the frame of many sistra, and faience models of them were left as offerings at her chief shrine at Thebes, in Deir el-Bahari. The menat is a necklace of several strings of beads joined to a counterweight. It rattled too, and, according to the Global Egyptian Museum’s glossary, it could be “one of the manifestations of Hathor”, its counterweight often shaped as her face. One relief shows the goddess holding a menat to the king’s nose “as if it were an ankh sign”.
Hathor columns and Dendera
Egyptian temple columns were often topped with her face. The British Museum’s 1909 guide describes capitals “sculptured in the form of the head of Hathor (the Cow-goddess), surmounted by a sistrum”, and suggests the form came from the poles topped with the head of a bull or cow that early Egyptians set up over the graves of their chiefs. A capital in the Pelizaeus-Museum, Hildesheim, has her face with cow’s ears and a heavy wig on all four sides, and once carried a small shrine on top; the House of Netjer reads the whole column as a sistrum, her face below a shrine-shaped rattle. One of her chief sanctuaries was Dendera in Upper Egypt, where, Erman wrote in 1907, her temple “still delights us with its beauty”; from the twenty-four columns of its front hall “the kindly countenance of Hathor smiles down upon us”, in his words.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsSekhmetThe lioness-headed goddess of Memphis, wife of Ptah, whose name means “the Powerful”. She wears a sun disc ringed by a cobra on her lion’s head, and Egyptian texts call her the eye of the sun god Ra, sent out to destroy his enemies.
- In the legend of the destruction of mankind Ra’s Eye goes out in the form of HathorEye of RaThe sun god Ra’s own eye, thought of as a goddess who could leave him and act on her own: as Hathor or the lioness Sekhmet she punished rebellious humans, and as the cobra on his brow she guarded him. It is a different idea from the eye of Horus, though Egyptian texts let the two overlap.
See also
Aphrodite, Goddesses of love, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Set.
Sources
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. I, ch. XIV, pp. 428–437
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 12–14, 30, 77, 211
- Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1912, Project Gutenberg, The Legend of the Destruction of Mankind
- A guide to the Egyptian collections in the British Museum, British Museum, 1909 (introduction by E. A. Wallis Budge), Harrison and Sons, London (Project Gutenberg), Chapter on temples
- Hathor capital (Global Egyptian Museum), Pelizaeus-Museum, Hildesheim, 1885, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Double-Headed Hathor Sistrum (Global Egyptian Museum), Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JE 29168, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Head of Hathor from a votive sistrum (Global Egyptian Museum), National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, 1901:787, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Menat (Global Egyptian Museum glossary), Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Menat
- Hethert (Names of Netjer), House of Netjer, “Names of Netjer” glossary, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), Hethert
- Names of Netjer (House of Netjer), House of Netjer, “Names of Netjer” glossary, introduction, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), introduction
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
Added .