The Aai

This page exists because the census this corpus is built on lists a divine group called the Aai, and the archived sources do not support it.

That is not a reason to delete the entry. It is a reason to show the work.

What the census claims

The aggregate list gives:

The Aai — Three guardian deities in the ninth division of Duat; they are Ab-ta, Anhefta, and Ermen-ta.

Three deities, one group, one function, one location.

What the source actually says

Budge, describing the ninth division of the Tuat [budge-1904]:

The pylon of the Ninth Division or Ninth Hour is called Aat-shefsheft; the serpent which guards it is Ab-ta; and the guardians of the corridor are Anhefta, and Ermen-ta. The wall is guarded by nine gods in mummied forms.

Read as a layout rather than a list, that is a fortified gate:

So the three named beings are not a trio. One is a serpent forming a gate; two are guardians stationed behind it. They hold three different posts of different kinds, and there are nine further gods in the same sentence that the census group does not mention at all.

And Budge never calls any of them "the Aai."

What "Aai" means in Budge

The word is in his text, and it means something else entirely.

His index has two entries: "Aai, ass-headed man, i. 196" and "Aai gods, i. 196." The passage describes a scene in the ninth division in which three men hold a rope thrown over the head of "a prostrate man who has the ears of an ass, and who is called Aai, i.e., 'Ass'." Each of the three holds a pike "which he is about to drive into the prostrate body" [budge-1904].

The scene is an execution. In front of the prostrate figure are the serpent Apep and a crocodile called Shesshes; the beings doing the work "are those who work magic for Ra on the arch-fiend Apep," and they say to him: "the slaughtering places are against thee, and the Aai gods are against thee" [budge-1904].

The Book of Gates volume illustrates it and captions the figures "The spearmen. Aai. Shesshes and Apep" [budge-1905-gates].

Elsewhere in the Litany of Re, Ra is praised as "indeed the bodies of Aai" [budge-1904] — one of a long series of such identifications.

The conclusion

On the evidence archived here, "the Aai" as a group of three gate-guardians is a construction of the aggregate list, not of the Egyptian material. It appears to fuse two unrelated things from the same division of the Tuat:

1. The named guardians of the ninth gate — a serpent and two corridor keepers. 2. A figure called Aai, an ass-eared captive being speared alongside Apep, and the "Aai gods" invoked against Apep in that scene.

The three named guardians are real, attested, and now have entries. The grouping is not.

Why the page stays

Three reasons.

Because a reader will arrive looking for it. "The Aai" is on the list that most people will have met first. A silent deletion leaves them thinking they mis-remembered.

Because the guardians deserve their entries. Ab-ta in particular turns out to be one of the most affecting figures found so far — the Book of Gates records that after Ra passes through his gate, "this gate closeth after this god hath passed through it, and the souls who are on the other side of it wail when they hear this door closing upon them" [budge-1905-gates].

Because the corpus's method is to investigate rather than delete. Seventeen names already sit in the provenance audit for the same reason: they could not be traced to a source this reference accepts, and the investigation is the content. This is that, applied to a group rather than a name.

Sources

• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. I, ninth division of the Tuat, pp. 194–196, and index. Public domain, archived in sources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md).
• [budge-1905-gates] — Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell / The Book of Gates (1905), vol. II, ninth division. Public domain, archived in sources-texts/.
• [wilkinson-2003] — Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.

Open threads

• Find where the aggregate list got "the Aai." If there is a published source that groups these three under that name, it should be cited and this page rewritten. The conclusion above is that there is none, and that conclusion is falsifiable.
• Identify the nine mummiform gods guarding the wall of the ninth division. They are in the same sentence as the three named guardians and are wholly absent from the census.
• Identify Sa, who speaks the gate formula to Ab-ta and stands look-out in the boat. Probably Perception, paired with Hu; he also appears in the Souls of Hermopolis triad. He has no entry and looks worth one.
• Resolve Anhefta's gender; the aggregate list calls the figure a goddess and Budge states nothing.
• Verify the "Ass" translation of Aai and establish whether the ass-eared captive is a form of Set — the donkey is elsewhere a Set animal, and an ass-eared figure speared beside Apep would fit that pattern. Untested.