Isis

Isis’s symbol is the throne, the hieroglyph that writes her name, which she wears on her head. From the New Kingdom she also wears the cow’s horns and sun disc she took from Hathor, and the knot amulet called the tyet was read as her blood.

Egyptian gods and their symbols. Also called aset, isis egyptian god, isis goddess, isis symbol, isis symbols, isis throne, symbol of isis.

Meaning

Isis (EYE-sis, in Dictionary.com’s respelling) was the wife and sister of Osiris and the mother of Horus, and for Wallis Budge, writing in 1904, “the greatest goddess of Egypt” from the earliest dynasties to the latest. Her Egyptian name, As or Ast, is written with a seat or throne. The Global Egyptian Museum says the name possibly means “seat” or “throne”, which is still disputed, but the throne on her head is the royal throne, and she was the symbolic mother of the living king. She is drawn as a woman with that throne on her head, or with cow’s horns and a sun disk; sometimes with wings on her arms, or as a bird, for the wings that gave the dead Osiris shade and breath and for the shrill cries of mourning women; and, in many Late Period bronzes, with Horus on her lap at the breast. Budge adds a vulture headdress and a papyrus sceptre in her hand. Her worship outlasted the others: at Philae it went on until a decree of Justinian ended it in about AD 537, and in the Hellenistic world it spread through the whole Roman Empire, with several temples in Rome itself.

Origin and history

The Egyptian texts make her the widow who found her husband. In a hymn to Osiris of the XVIIIth dynasty, first published by Chabas and translated by Budge, Isis “sought him without ceasing”, wandering round the earth with cries of pain until she found him; “she made air … with her wings”, raised up the still body, conceived a child and suckled it in secret. Budge reads the Pyramid Texts as already telling how Isis and her sister Nephthys came in the form of two birds and found Osiris “thrown on the ground in Netat by his brother Set”. In Adolf Erman’s retelling (1907) she became pregnant as she hovered over the body as a sparrow-hawk, then fled to the Delta marshes near Khemmis to bear Horus where Set could not find him; no picture, Erman says, was more loved by the Egyptians than this mother with her child on her knee.

Plutarch’s Greek version adds Byblos, where the chest holding Osiris had been built into a pillar of the king’s house. Isis became nurse to the queen’s baby, turned into a swallow at night to flit round the pillar wailing, and at last showed herself as a goddess and asked for the pillar. In Plutarch, Horus is already alive when Osiris dies; in the Egyptian tradition, the Global Egyptian Museum notes, he was conceived after Isis had made the scattered body into the first mummy and breathed life into it with her wings.

A legend in Budge’s Legends of the Gods (1912) explains her magic. Isis wanted the secret name of the sun god Ra. She mixed his spittle with dust, shaped a serpent and left it on his daily path; when it bit him, she would drive out the poison only when he agreed that “my name shall pass from my body into hers”. The spell she spoke was then used against the bite or sting of every venomous reptile.

Isis or Hathor?

The crown alone will not tell them apart. The Global Egyptian Museum says that from at least the New Kingdom Isis took her headdress of cow’s horns and sun disk from Hathor, who is drawn as a woman with cow’s horns and a sun disk between them, or wholly as a cow; Budge says the horns Isis wears are usually Hathor’s cow’s horns. Look for the throne. On Isis it sits on her head, or above the disk between the horns, and Budge notes she can also wear the double crown with the feather of Maat behind it. The many Late Period bronzes of a goddess suckling Horus on her lap are Isis, the Global Egyptian Museum says.

The knot of Isis

The tyet, called tit by the Egyptians, was read from the New Kingdom on as the symbol of Isis in particular, and also of Nephthys, the Global Egyptian Museum says. Chapter 156 of the Book of the Dead ties it to her blood, so it was called the blood of Isis; pregnant women used its spells against bleeding and miscarriage, and excavators have found it between the legs of pregnant women. The museum also reports the doubt of the Egyptologist Bonnet, for whom any tie between the knot and her blood is “by no means certain”, though its usual red colour suggests one.

Sources

Isis, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Isis
Osiris, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Osiris
Isis knot, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Isis knot
Hathor, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Hathor
The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume II, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. II, ch. XIII, Isis, pp. 202–204
Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1899, Project Gutenberg, Chapter on Osiris (hymn first published by Chabas)
Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1912, Project Gutenberg, Isis and Ra; Isis and Osiris
A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 33–34
Isis and Osiris, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), §§ 15–16
Dictionary.com: Isis, Dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Dictionary.com

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research

Added October 10, 2026.

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