The Akhemu-seku
Status: ◐ drafted (2026-07-29) · Source: Budge 1905, Book of Gates, tenth division of the Tuat
Twelve gods stand in the tenth hour of the night, each holding a paddle. Beside them stand twelve goddesses, each holding a rope, each with a star above her head. Between them they are moving the sun toward the sunrise.
The twelve with the paddles are the Akhemu-seku, and their name is a description: "gods who never diminish" [budge-1905-gates].
A note on finding them
This group appears on the census as "The Ikhemu-sek." Searched under that spelling, the archived sources return nothing at all.
Under Budge's Akhemu-seku they turn out to be one of the best-documented groups in the whole corpus — a named roster, translated speeches, and iconography. The group was one failed search away from being written off as unrecoverable.
What "never diminish" means
It is astronomy, and it is exact.
Most stars rise and set: they appear, cross, and go below the horizon — they diminish. But the stars near the celestial pole never set. They circle a fixed point all night, every night, all year, and they are never extinguished.
The Egyptians called them the imperishable stars, and Budge records three classes of such beings dwelling in Sekhet-Aaru — Akhemu-seku, Akhemu-Betesh and Akhemu-Sesh-emau — "that is to say, three classes of celestial bodies" [budge-1904].
So this is not a poetic epithet. It is what you get when people watch the sky carefully for a very long time and then build a theology out of what they see.
The register
Budge lists the lower register of the tenth division in order [budge-1905-gates]:
| Figure | Marked by | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Twelve male beings — the Akhemu-seku | a paddle each |
| 2 | Twelve female beings — "the hours who tow along" | a rope each, a star above each head |
| 3 | Banti | cynocephalus ape head, sceptre |
| 4 | Seshsha | man-headed, star above, sceptre |
| 5 | Ka-Amenti | bull-headed, sceptre |
| 6 | Renen-sbau | man-headed, star above, sceptre |
| 7 | A monkey, star above, "the god of Rethenu" | — |
| 8 | A bracket bearing the Utchat | — |
| 9 | Her-nest-f | sceptre only |
None of these nine is on the 497-name census. They were found by reading.
What Ra says to them
The speech is the reason this group is worth a page [budge-1905-gates]:
Those who are in this picture make a rising up for Ra, and they take their paddles in this Circle of Unti. They come into being of their own accord at the seasons when Ra is born in Nut; they come into being for the births of Ra, and they make their appearance in Nu along with him. It is they who transport this great god after he hath taken his place in the horizon of the East of heaven.
Ra saith unto them: "Take ye your paddles and unite ye yourselves to your stars. Your coming into being taketh place when I come into being, and your births take place when my births take place. O ye beings who transport me, ye shall not suffer diminution, O ye gods Akhemu-seku."
Three things in that are worth pulling out.
"Unite ye yourselves to your stars." Each god has a star and is instructed to join it. The relationship between a god and a celestial body is not identity here — it is something a god does, on command, at the right moment.
Births, plural, all the way through. "The seasons when Ra is born," "the births of Ra," "your births take place when my births take place." Nothing in this text happens once. Sunrise is not an event that occurred at the beginning of the world; it is an event that occurs, and the gods who serve it are re-created each time it does.
"Ye shall not suffer diminution." Ra says it as a promise, and it is also their name. He is telling them what they are.
And the hours pull
The twelve goddesses beside them get their own speech [budge-1905-gates]:
Those who are in this scene take hold of the rope of the boat of Ra to tow him along into the sky… Ra saith unto them: "Take ye the rope, set ye yourselves in position, and pull ye me, O my followers, into the height of heaven, and lead ye me along the ways. My births make you to be born, and behold, my coming into being maketh you to come into being. O stablish ye the periods of time and years for him who is among you."
The last line is the striking one. The goddesses of the hours are told to establish time — to fix the periods and the years — for the god they are towing. Time is not the medium the journey happens in. It is manufactured by the journey, by the beings doing the pulling, as they pull.
Which is the corpus's recurring finding in yet another form: nothing here runs by itself. The sun is towed. The sky is held up. Maat is propped. Time is established by twelve goddesses with a rope, nightly.
The men row and the women tow
Worth noting because the division is total. The twelve male gods hold paddles — they propel the boat. The twelve female goddesses hold a rope — they haul it from outside.
Both crews are needed, and neither does the other's job. Egyptian art is full of gendered pairings, but this one is unusually mechanical: two entirely different modes of moving the same object, running simultaneously.
Budge admits what he does not know
A small thing that improves his credibility here. Having found four description paragraphs for a register containing seven individual figures, he assigns them by position and then says so plainly:
The above four paragraphs must refer to the four gods Banti, Seshshaa, Ka-Amenti, and Renen-sbau, and therefore the god of Rethenu, the Utchat, and the god Her-nest-f remain without descriptions. [budge-1905-gates]
Every one of the five entries built from this register carries that caveat. The attributions are Budge's inference, not the text's, and Her-nest-f is graded ○ name-only precisely because the source itself says there is nothing to say about him.
Sources
[budge-1905-gates]— Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell / The Book of Gates (1905), vol. II, tenth division of the Tuat, pp. 273–278. Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md), but note that on this material he describes, translates and flags his own inferences — his strongest register.[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. I, on the beings of Sekhet-Aaru, citing Book of the Dead cxxv Pt. iii l. 19. Public domain, archived insources-texts/.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open threads
- Get the other two classes. Budge names Akhemu-Betesh and Akhemu-Sesh-emau alongside the Akhemu-seku and describes neither. Book of the Dead cxxv Pt. iii l. 19 is his citation; that passage would likely yield two more groups.
- Confirm the circumpolar reading. "Never diminish" is glossed here as the imperishable stars that do not set. It is the standard understanding and it is not stated in any archived source — Budge says only "celestial bodies."
- Get the literal Egyptian behind "in their places (literally, towns)" — Budge flags his own softening, and the word is the best thing in the register.
- Check the four descriptions against the hieroglyphic text to confirm or overturn Budge's positional attribution.
- Identify "the god of Rethenu." Rethenu is Syria-Palestine; a foreign god in the tenth hour of the Egyptian underworld is unexpected and unexplained here.
- Get the Ramesses VI version, which Budge cites Lefébure for.