The Cult and Nome of the Goddess Bat

Abstract

Although the fetish that served as the emblem of Upper Egyptian nome 7 is one of the most familiar motifs in Egyptian art and architecture, remarkably little is known about the local divinity it originally embodied the goddess Bat, whose human face with bovine ears and horns may derive from Mesopotamia,1 and whose Egyptian name is apparently a feminine form of the word hi soul. The Sixth Dynasty tombs of the nomarchs at Qasr es-Sayyad make no mention of either the nome capital or its local goddess, nor do the very meager inscriptions of the same period that have been recovered at Abadiya.2 But the chief reason for our lack of information is the fact that the b;t-fetish. was associated at a relatively early date although by no means so early as is generally supposed with the goddess Hathor, who supplanted an older crocodile god in the neighboring 6th nome3 and by the end of the Fourth Dynasty had made her Denderite cult one of the most influential in Upper Egypt.4 By the New Kingdom Bat was completely eclipsed by her powerful neighbor, and Hathor ruled in her place as mistress of Hu, or IJw.t-shm Mansion of the Sistrum, as the capital of the 7th nome was then called.5 Were it not for the shrine of Sesostris I at Karnak, on which Bat is explicitly named as the local divinity of nome 7 (Fig. i),6 one would scarcely suppose that her local cult still bore her own name rather than Hathor's as late as the Twelfth Dynasty. Unassuming as it is, the funerary stela presented in Fig. 2 and PL I is therefore of considerable interest, since it brings us into more immediate contact with the goddess in question, referring to a woman who, at the end of the Old Kingdom, actually belonged to her temple's personnel. This stela is now in the museum