A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work.
Amunet jmnt
the hidden one, feminine
Part of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis.
Overview
Amunet is Amun's name with a feminine ending, and both things Budge says about her describe her being replaced.
Attestation history
Two clauses, both from the section on Mut, and both about what happened to Amunet rather than what she did [budge-1904]:
Displaced at Thebes. Mut "locally… usurped the position of Ament, the old female counterpart of Amen."
Absorbed at Hermopolis. Mut was also identified "with the primeval goddess Ament, who formed one of the four goddesses of the company of the gods of Hermopolis, which was adopted in its entirety by the priests of Amen for their gods."
That second clause records the Ogdoad takeover from the Theban side — see the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, where the standard modern roster opens with Amun–Amunet while Budge's opens with Nu and closes with a pair Amun displaced.
What the texts say
She is the older wife. Budge's phrase is "the old female counterpart of Amen" — the one who held the position before Mut. This corpus has documented five Theban acquisitions; Amunet is the casualty of one of them.
And she is a grammatical construction. Amunet is Amun with a feminine -t. Compare Naunet from Nu, Hehut from Hehu, Kekuit from Kekui — the whole female half of the Ogdoad is formed this way, which is precisely the ground of Maspero's argument that those four goddesses were "gods formed according to the laws of grammar."
Amunet is the clearest case, because her masculine counterpart is the best-attested god in Egypt and she is two clauses in a footnote to someone else's story.
What she is not. No narrative, no epithet, no iconography, no locus, no cult of her own is recorded here. The grade says so.
Iconography
None recorded.
Cult and practice
None independent of Amun. At Thebes her position was taken by Mut.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, on the forms of Mut | Mut "usurped the position of Ament, the old female counterpart of Amen" |
[budge-1904] | same | Ament as "the primeval goddess… one of the four goddesses of the company of the gods of Hermopolis," adopted in its entirety by the priests of Amen |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. II. Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md). He gives her no independent treatment — both mentions are incidental to Mut.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- Find Amunet acting independently anywhere. If she never does, that is a positive finding and materially strengthens Maspero's grammatical-artefact reading of the Ogdoad's four goddesses.
- Get her Karnak evidence. She has a known presence in the Theban festival record and among the statuary at Karnak, and none of it is in the archive.
- Establish when Mut displaced her, with a dated text — that would date one of the five Theban acquisitions.
- Distinguish Amunet from Amentet, the goddess of the West, whose name is close enough in Budge's transliteration to be a collision risk. A sixth possible name-collision.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Amunet", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.