Well documented. Several independent sources across different periods. In the record from the very beginning.
Hathor ḥwt-ḥr
house of Horus, lady of the sycamore
The myth, retold
The story as it is told
A retelling, not a translation. What follows is the story as it is commonly told, drawn together from the better popular and scholarly accounts. It is not keyed to any single ancient text, and the ancient sources rarely agree with each other as neatly as a retelling has to. The attested record — with its sources, its gaps, and its disagreements — is below.
Hathor's name is written as a falcon inside a building — hut-Hor, the house of Horus. And the house is understood to be her own body, with the god inside it.
That is her, in one sign: she is where a god comes from.
She has the widest range of any of them
Music. Dancing. Drunkenness. Sex. Joy. Cosmetics. Motherhood. Mining expeditions. Foreign trade. And the welcome of the dead into the west.
That list looks incoherent until you notice that Egyptian religion did not separate pleasure from danger, or the party from the funeral, the way we instinctively do. Hathor is what happens when a culture declines to put those in different departments.
She is also the same power as Sekhmet. Sent out as the Eye of Ra to punish humanity, Hathor becomes the lioness who nearly finishes the species, and has to be stopped with beer dyed red. The gentle face and the lethal one are one goddess, and the story is the mechanism by which she turns from one into the other.
There is no fixed number of her
Here is my favourite thing about Hathor, and it is a genuine research problem.
There are the Seven Hathors — a set of goddesses who attend a birth and determine the child's fate. Except Budge, working from the sources, prints two completely different lists of the seven, from different texts, and observes that the company of the Seven Hathors did not always include the same forms of the goddess.
Seven Hathors, and the seven are not the same seven depending on who is asking.
And in the same passage she is identified with six other goddesses outright — Bast, Sati, Uatchet, Sekhet, the Lady of Ammu, Neith.
So the honest answer to "how many Hathors are there" is that the question is badly formed. She is less a person than a role, and different local goddesses step into it. Working out where Hathor ends is an open piece of work, not a gap in the reference.
Lady of turquoise, at the end of the road
At Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai — a hard, remote place where Egyptians mined turquoise — there is a temple to Hathor, and expedition members left votive offerings there for centuries.
Think about what that means. You are a long way from home on a mining expedition in the desert, and the goddess you have brought with you is the goddess of joy and drunkenness and music. That is not decoration. That is who you want out there.
She is also worshipped at Byblos on the Levantine coast, which is one of several points where the Egyptian and Levantine worlds turn out to be more entangled than the tidy version suggests.
The rattle was the offering
Her instrument is the sistrum — a rattle. You shook it, and the shaking was itself the offering. Not an accompaniment to the rite; the rite.
Her priestesses were musicians by profession. Very little in Egyptian religion is as participatory as this: not watching, not petitioning, not making a donation. Making a noise.
Votive deposits at her shrines are full of mirrors and cosmetic items and small figurines left by ordinary people, largely women. Her festivals involved public drinking. The Festival of Drunkenness at Dendera was a formal rite in which intoxication was the point, and it is recorded in temple texts as such.
How to recognise her, and why you will get it wrong
A cow, or a woman with cow's ears, or a woman crowned with cow horns enclosing a sun disk.
That last one is the trap. From the Late Period, Isis wears the same crown, and late Isis and late Hathor become almost impossible to tell apart. Read the inscription. If there is no inscription, be honest that you are guessing.
The reliable identifier is the Hathoric capital — a column head carved with her frontal face, ears and all, on every one of its four sides. Nothing else in Egyptian architecture looks like it, and the great temple at Dendera is full of them.
Greeks identified her with Aphrodite, which gets the love and the beauty and throws away the funeral and the sun. It is a good example of how much interpretatio graeca costs you.
Overview
Hathor's name means "house of Horus" — she is written as a falcon inside a building, and the house is understood to be her own body, in which the god is carried. That is her range in a single sign: she is where a god comes from.
She is the most emotionally broad deity in the Egyptian system. Music, drunkenness, sex, joy, cosmetics, and dancing are hers; so is the welcome of the dead into the west; so is the sun's own destructive eye. Egyptian religion did not treat pleasure and danger as separate departments, and Hathor is the clearest evidence of that.
She is also structurally unstable in the best way: Hathor is a role as much as a person. Budge prints two entirely different lists of the Seven Hathors, from different sources, and observes that the seven "did not always include the same forms of the goddess" [budge-1904]. Six other goddesses — Bast, Sati, Uatchet, Sekhet, the Lady of Ammu, and Neith — are identified with her in the same passage. Working out where Hathor ends is a genuine research problem, not a gap in the record.
Attestation history
Old Kingdom. Hathor is prominent early, closely tied to kingship; Old Kingdom queens serve as her priestesses, and she appears in royal statuary alongside the king.
Middle and New Kingdom. Her cult is one of the most widespread in Egypt. At Deir el-Bahari she is worshipped in cow form as the goddess who receives the dead; at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai she is "lady of turquoise," patron of the mining expeditions — one of the clearest cases of an Egyptian deity attached to an industry and a frontier.
Ptolemaic period. The temple at Dendera is built, and survives largely intact. Its ceiling astronomical reliefs and its Hathoric columns — capitals carved as the goddess's face on all four sides — are among the most complete statements of late Egyptian temple theology standing.
What the texts say
The Eye of Ra and the Destruction of Mankind. Ra sends out his Eye to punish humanity; in the telling it is Hathor who goes and becomes Sekhmet in the doing, and has to be stopped with beer dyed red. Hathor and Sekhmet are not two goddesses who happen to be linked: they are the gentle and the lethal faces of one solar power, and the story is the mechanism by which one becomes the other.
Lady of the sycamore. She appears from a sycamore fig at the desert edge, offering bread and water to the dead as they enter the west. It is a small, domestic image for the largest possible transition.
The Byblos connection. Hathor is worshipped at Byblos on the Levantine coast, and Plutarch's version of the Osiris myth brings Isis there [plutarch-iside] — one of several places where the Egyptian and Levantine worlds are visibly entangled.
Music as ritual. The sistrum, a rattle whose shaking was itself the offering, is her instrument. Priestesses of Hathor were musicians by profession. Very little in Egyptian religion is as directly participatory as this.
Iconography
A cow, or a woman with cow's ears, or a woman wearing cow horns enclosing a sun disk. That last crown is the problem: from the Late Period Isis wears it too, and the two goddesses become visually almost identical. Read the inscription, not the crown.
The Hathoric capital — a column head carved with her frontal face, ears and all, on every side — is unmistakable and unique to her.
Cult and practice
Dendera is the great surviving centre; its annual festival carried Hathor's image upriver to Edfu for a ritual union with Horus, one of the best-documented Egyptian festivals precisely because both temples survive to describe it.
Her worship was notably popular rather than exclusively royal: votive offerings at her shrines include mirrors, cosmetic items, and figurines left by ordinary people, and her festivals involved public drinking. The Festival of Drunkenness at Dendera was a formal rite in which intoxication was the point.
Reception
Greeks identified her with Aphrodite [herodotus-ii], which captures the love and beauty and misses the funerary and solar halves entirely — a good example of how much interpretatio graeca throws away.
"Hathor" may be a category, not a name — checked 2026-07-30
Petrie states it flatly: "Hathor was a generic name for a goddess… there was the Hathor of foreign lands, such as Punt or Sinai; there was the Hathor of home towns, as Dendera or Atfih; and Hathor was as widely known, and yet as local, as the Madonna" [petrie-1895b]. He asserts it without demonstrating it, so it was tested against the archive.
It holds. Budge yields Hathor of Cusae, Hathor of Dendera, Hathor of Diospolis, Hathor of Aphroditopolis and Hathor of Nutenti [budge-1904] — and titles his chapter not "Hathor" but "Hathor and the Hathor-Goddesses," treating the plural as a class.
If that is right, "Hathor" behaves less like a personal name than like a heading under which local goddesses were filed — which also explains why there can be seven of them without anyone finding it odd. Compare horus, where the same structure was found independently (C151): Heru-ur, Heru-merti, Heru-khuti and the rest are a family of forms, not one god with nicknames.
Two of the largest names in the Egyptian pantheon may both be classes. Not asserted as settled — Petrie's Punt and Sinai examples are not in the archive, and a lexicon would decide it properly.
See also the Seven Hathors — seven goddesses who pronounce fate at a birth, and whose existence turns on whether "Hathor" is a personal name or a category (C199).
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* I | the two variant lists of the Seven Hathors; identification with six other goddesses |
[budge-1901] | Book of the Dead | funerary role; the welcome of the dead |
[herodotus-ii] | *Histories* II | Greek identification with Aphrodite |
[plutarch-iside] | *De Iside et Osiride* | the Byblos episode |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904). Public domain. Budge caveat applies; used here for the Hathor lists, which are transcription. Extracted todata/seven-hathors.json.[budge-1901]— Budge, trans., Egyptian Literature (1901). Public domain.[herodotus-ii]— Herodotus, Histories II, trans. Rawlinson (1858). Public domain.[plutarch-iside]— Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, trans. King (1908). Public domain.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- Verify the Seven Hathors place-name readings against the 1904 page image; they are Budge-era and OCR-derived.
- Cite the Dendera–Edfu festival from a published translation of the temple texts.
- Get an excavation reference for the Serabit el-Khadim votive material.
- Date the point at which Isis adopts the Hathoric crown — the same open thread as on the Isis entry.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ●full — Multiple attestations across periods.
"Hathor", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded full, retrieved 2026-08-10.