Summary Of Hathor: The Antiquity Of Feminism

Hathor : The Antiquity of Feminism

The decentralization and shifting of power from the Pharaohs to the common people in ancient Egypt came about during the period of Middle Kingdom (2050 -1786 BCE). With the change of power or democratization, the common people, known as nomarchs, began to revise funerary spells of the Pyramid Texts (writings engraved in stone walls) that had existed from the preceding pharaoh-governed Old Kingdom. They then inscribed those modified funerary spells on and inside the coffins, known as the Coffin Texts. And it is in the Coffin Texts where more extensive descriptions of the goddess Hathor were found. These descriptions help in explaining the reasons she was such an important deity among the nomarchs.

With the shifting of power the intensity of desire among the nomarchs to live a worry-free eternal life did not change at all. Rather it remained identical to that of the pharaohs. In the funerary inscriptions on the coffins, the Nomarchs began to highlight Hathor’s importance as an intercessory or mediator of
When she was not represented in full cow form, she was depicted as a woman with a cow’s head atop her torso. At other times, she had a woman’s body and face, and atop her head had a pair of outward-pointing horns that had grown encircling a scarlet sun disc. During the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when day and night are of equal length, the sky above would perfectly align with the ground below. And the Egyptians would think the cow-goddess Hathor supported the Milky Way with her four legs and her belly was studded with stars. Because of the Milky Way’s milky patch of the sky, the Egyptian would think Hathor as a lactating cow that could produce a lot of milk. And associated her prolific feature with annual inundation of the Nile that deposited a lot of silt and made an otherwise desert region a fertile land. Invariably the Egyptians coined Hathor the goddess of