Nehebkau nḥb-kꜣw

Overview

Nehebkau is a serpent who brings food, sits on the bench that judges the dead, and — in the fourth hour of the underworld — has three heads arranged wrong.

He is also the corpus's clearest case of a deity whose gender Budge cannot keep straight: masculine in the Pyramid Text quotation and in the Tuat, feminine throughout the Henen-su section. See below; it is not silently resolved here.

Attestation history

Old Kingdom. In the text of Unas the king is told to see the gods unveiled "as Horus seeth Isis, and that Unas may see you as Nehebu-kau seeth Selqet" [budge-1904]. Budge cites this passage as line 597 in one place and line 599 in another; the discrepancy is his.

A cult at Henen-su. "There existed in the temple there a shrine which was dedicated to the goddess Neheb-kau, who was worshipped there in the form of a huge serpent" [budge-1904]. Heracleopolis is one of very few places where a deity of this kind has a recorded, sited cult rather than only a textual existence.

A festival with a date. Budge, citing Brugsch: among the greatest festivals at Henen-su were those in honour of Neheb-kau, "celebrated on the first of Tybi, that is to say, nine days after the 'Festival of Ploughing the Earth', Khebs-ta, when men began to plough the land after the subsidence of the waters of the Inundation" [budge-1904].

A feeding god, nine days after the ploughing begins.

Assessor 40. In the Negative Confession of the Papyrus of Ani: "Hail, Neheb-kau, who comest forth from thy city, I have not been overweeningly proud" [budge-1895]. The declaration immediately before it is addressed to Neheb-nefert, a name that does not recur.

Establishing the head. In the Papyrus of Nu (ch. cxlix, l. 5) the deceased says that Nehebkau "hath stablished his head for him" [budge-1904].

In the fourth hour of the Tuat. Among the monsters that "make their journey daily round about the region of the Fourth Hour, and they live upon what they find on their way," Budge lists "the serpent Neheb-kau, which has two heads at one end of its body, and one head at the other" [budge-1904].

Identifications. "Elsewhere she seems to be mentioned as a form of Nut, and to be the female counterpart of the serpent god Nau" [budge-1904].

What the texts say

He feeds the dead on something that is not food. This is the substantial idea, and Budge states it well: Nehebkau "provided for the dead meat and drink, not the material offerings of earth, but the divine tchefau food — "which may be compared to the nectar and ambrosia on which the gods of Olympus lived" [budge-1904].

The distinction matters. Egyptian mortuary religion is anxious about physical provisioning — estates, offering formulas, priests delivering bread and beer to tombs in perpetuity. But the system also knew that the arrangement was fragile, and produced a second answer: a divine food that does not depend on anyone remembering to bring it.

Nehebkau supplies that. He is the insurance policy against a lapsed endowment.

"He who harnesses the kas." The name is generally read from nḥb, to harness or yoke, and kꜣw, the plural of ka — the vital double. This entry does not assert that reading, because Budge does not gloss the name at all; it is recorded in the open threads. If it is right, it fits: harnessing the kas is close to what provisioning the dead means, and the ka is precisely the part of a person that needs feeding.

Three heads, asymmetrically. Two at one end, one at the other. Not a symmetrical monster and not an obvious design — most Egyptian composite creatures are either regular or expressive, and this is neither. Recorded without explanation, because none is offered.

Budge cannot decide his gender. Nehebu-kau is the seeing subject in a masculine construction at Unas; the serpent of the fourth hour is "which"; and the Henen-su passage is consistently "she," "her," "the goddess." Modern Egyptology treats Nehebkau as male. The corpus records the inconsistency rather than picking a side — this is the second such case after Anhefta, and both are in Budge.

Iconography

A serpent. In the funerary form, "often depicted in the form of a serpent with human legs and arms, and sometimes with wings also," carrying "one or two vases containing food for the deceased" [budge-1904].

In the fourth hour of the Tuat, the three-headed asymmetric form.

Cult and practice

Henen-su (Heracleopolis) — a dedicated shrine within the temple, a serpent cult, and an annual festival on the first of Tybi [budge-1904]. Among the beings this corpus has written up from the underworld books and judgment lists, very few have this much civic reality, and it is worth marking.