Sekhmet
The 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.
Meaning
Sekhmet is a woman with the head of a lioness. Above it, as Budge described her in 1904, sits “the solar disk encircled by an uraeus”, the cobra of the uraeus; sometimes the disc is left out and only the cobra is seen. Statues in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, give her a three-part wig under the disc and a long tunic that leaves her feet showing, and a seated statue once held the ankh in its left hand, according to the Global Egyptian Museum. A statue in Cairo that gives her the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt instead of the disc is counted rare. Her name means “the Powerful” in the museum’s translation, “The Powerful One” in the Brooklyn Museum’s; Budge derived it from a root meaning “to be strong, mighty, violent”. At Memphis she was the wife of Ptah and mother of the god Nefertem, and in many texts she is called the “Eye of Ra”. Budge took her for the burning, destructive heat of the sun. The House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy) honours her today as one of the Names of Netjer and calls her lioness the symbol of “appropriate action, especially appropriate violence/destruction”.
Origin and history
Her name is old: Budge found it in the Pyramid Texts of King Unas. She belonged to Memphis, where she made up a triad of gods with Ptah and Nefertem.
In the Eighteenth Dynasty Amenhotep III set up hundreds of statues of her in the temple of the goddess Mut at Karnak, the Global Egyptian Museum notes; the Metropolitan Museum of Art puts the number at some six hundred, and says there may once have been 730, one seated and one standing for every day of the year. The Met calls them a “litany in stone” that appeased the goddess and asked her not to use her powers against the king, keeping him from illness and evil for a year. The Brooklyn Museum reads her disc and cobra as marks of the daughter of the sun god Re.
Hathor or Sekhmet?
In the legend of the destruction of mankind, the Egyptian text names both. As Budge translated it in 1912 from the chamber in the tomb of Seti I, Ra sends out his Eye “in the form of Hathor”, and the goddess kills the rebels in the desert; then “Sekhet of the offerings waded about in the night season in their blood, beginning at Suten-henen”, Herakleopolis. The text does not describe one goddess turning into the other; it calls her by one name and then the other. The House of Netjer holds that Sekhmet began as a fierce form of Hathor, “more accurate” to call “Sekhmet-Hethert”, and only later became a goddess in her own right.
The rest of the story is read in two ways. In Budge’s version Ra has mandrakes brought and given to “Sekhet, the goddess who dwelleth in Annu (Heliopolis)” to crush, and they are mixed into beer with the blood of the dead. Adolf Erman, retelling the same text in 1907, gives a fruit called didi, “some kind of fruit with red juice”, pounded by “the curly-haired one of Heliopolis”, so that the beer only “became like human blood”. Either way the goddess drinks the beer that has flooded the fields, becomes drunk and no longer recognises men. The whole legend is on the eye of Ra page.
Sekhmet or Bastet?
Without their attributes the two are hard to tell apart. Erman wrote that when Bastet’s sistrum and basket are left out it is difficult to distinguish her cat’s head from Sekhmet’s lion’s head, and that the Egyptians themselves linked the two goddesses for that reason. Flinders Petrie, cataloguing the amulets at University College London in 1914, gave up on many: “Many figures cannot be separated between these two lion- or cat-headed goddesses”. He named a figure Sekhmet by the disc on its head, and a bronze holding a sistrum, a basket and an aegis “certainly Bastet”. In late times, Budge adds, both were given lioness heads and paired as goddesses of the West and the East, Sekhmet dressed in red and Bastet in green. His own reading, that Sekhmet was the fierce heat of the sun and Bastet the milder heat that makes seeds grow, is Budge’s theory.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsBastetThe cat goddess of Bubastis in the Nile Delta, drawn as a woman with a cat’s head holding a sistrum, often with a basket on her arm. Herodotus saw her festival there and wrote that the Egyptians took their dead cats to Bubastis to be embalmed and buried.
- Egyptian texts call Sekhmet the Eye of Ra; she wears its sun disc and cobraEye 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
Ptah, Hathor, Goddesses of war, Osiris, Isis, Horus.
Sources
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. I, ch. XVI, pp. 446–447, 514–517
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 13–14, 30
- Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1912, Project Gutenberg, The Legend of the Destruction of Mankind
- Amulets, illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London, W. M. Flinders Petrie, 1914, Constable and Company, London (Internet Archive), No. 194
- Statue of Sakhmet (Global Egyptian Museum), Global Egyptian Museum record 4335, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Statue of Lioness-Headed Sekhmet (Global Egyptian Museum), Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JE 60749, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Statue of Sekhmet Wearing the Double Crown (Global Egyptian Museum), Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JE 60359, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
- Statue of the Goddess Sakhmet (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Statue of the Goddess Sakhmet, reign of Amenhotep III, catalogue entry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogue description
- Bust of the Goddess Sakhmet (Brooklyn Museum), Bust of the Goddess Sakhmet, about 1390–1352 BC, collection entry, Brooklyn Museum, label text
- Sekhmet (Names of Netjer), House of Netjer, “Names of Netjer” glossary, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), Sekhmet
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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