Min mnw

Min is the most sexually explicit image in Egyptian religion, and Egyptian art presents him with no hedging whatsoever.

He stands wrapped like a mummy, legs together and barely differentiated, entirely static — except for two things. He is ithyphallic, permanently and unmistakably. And his right arm is raised above and behind his shoulder, holding a flail.

Everything about the figure is still except that one lifted limb.

The title is the posture

What I find striking is that the Egyptians named him for the arm rather than the anatomy.

Budge records the title Fa-a — "the god of the lifted hand."

Not the god of fertility. Not the god of generation, though he is that too. The god of that gesture, the raised arm holding the flail, which is the part of the image a sculptor would have thought hardest about and a worshipper would have recognised from across a courtyard.

It is the difference between naming a saint for their martyrdom and naming them for how they are always painted.

Two nomes, and one is called after him

Egypt was administered as forty-two provinces, and each had a god.

Min has two — the fifth nome of Upper Egypt, whose capital is Coptos, and the ninth, whose capital is Apu, which the Greeks called Panopolis.

And the ninth nome is itself named Amsu — one of Min's own names. Not "the nome of the god Amsu." The district is called Amsu.

Very few Egyptian gods hold two provinces, and fewer still have one named after them. Whatever else Min was, he was locally enormous, in a stretch of Upper Egypt that most histories of Egyptian religion pass over on the way to Thebes.

Thebes took his body

Here is the part that connects him to everything else in this reference.

Amun was the greatest god of the New Kingdom — the state god, the one with the largest religious building ever constructed. His name means "the hidden one." He is normally shown as a man in a tall double-plumed crown, dignified and clothed.

But when Amun had to be shown as a generative power, Egyptian artists did not invent anything. Budge:

Another form of Amen-Ra is that in which he is represented with the body of the ithyphallic god Amsu, or Min, or Khem, i.e., as the personification of the power of generation… he has one hand and arm raised to support [the flail], which he holds above his shoulder; he is called "Amen-Ra, the bull of his mother," and possesses all the attributes of Fa-a, i.e., the "god of the lifted hand."

Amun borrowed Min's body. Posture, arm, flail, title and all.

This corpus has watched Thebes do this repeatedly and it is always the same manoeuvre. Amun's problem was that he arrived late, so his priesthood acquired what he lacked: an ancient moon god as a son, a primeval goddess as a consort, a place in the Hermopolitan Ogdoad, and — when the subject was generation — a provincial god's entire iconography.

Nothing was invented. Something existing was picked up and used.

Standing with two Syrians

There is one object where Min turns up in company that makes no obvious sense.

British Museum stele No. 191 shows a naked goddess standing on the back of a lion, facing straight out at the viewer. She is called "Kent, lady of heaven," and she is the goddess Egyptologists call Qetesh — a Syrian import. On one side of her stands Reshpu, a Syrian war god with a gazelle head projecting from his turban.

On the other side stands Min.

Budge calls the three "a Semitic triad," and then admits he cannot work out the relationships: "it is not clear which of these two gods was her son, and which was her husband."

Which leaves an Egyptian nome god — Old Kingdom, two provinces, thoroughly native — standing in a family group with two deities from Syria.

Nothing in the sources explains it. The most economical guess is that the imported goddess of love and beauty was paired with the nearest available Egyptian equivalent, and Min was the obvious candidate. But that is a guess, and the stele itself would settle it.

What is missing

He is famous for two things this reference cannot yet show.

He was the patron of the eastern desert — Coptos sits at the mouth of the Wadi Hammamat, the road from the Nile to the Red Sea and to the stone quarries, and expedition inscriptions there invoke him. Plausible from the geography, absent from the sources.

And his festival, the going forth of Min, involved a procession, a raised standard, and lettuce, which the Egyptians associated with him for reasons that are not subtle.

Neither is in anything archived here. Both are on his page as open threads, which is where things belong when you know them from elsewhere and cannot yet point at them.