Heryshaf ḥrj-š=f

Heryshaf is the ram-god of Herakleopolis, and he is the clearest example I have found of a god who nearly went missing because of spelling.

He appears in four separate books read for this reference. He appears under six different forms of his name, across three languages. And a straightforward search for the version in the modern handbooks turns up nothing — because nobody who wrote him down in the nineteenth century spelled him that way.

Her-shef. Hershef. Hersheft. Heru-shefit. Arsaphes. Harsaphes.

Six doors, and the one marked Heryshaf is not among them.

What he looked like

The picture is unusually complete, which is a relief after all that.

A horned, ram-headed man, wearing the White Crown — the tall bowling-pin crown of Upper Egypt — with plumes rising from it and a sun-disk. Every element of that comes out of a single sentence, which is why it is safe to draw.

His city had three names in one paragraph: Suten-henen, Henensu, Het-Henensu. The Greeks called it Herakleopolis Magna. It sat at the mouth of the Faiyum, and in the unsettled centuries between the Old and Middle Kingdoms it was, briefly, the capital of Egypt.

The lake, or the virility

The name is ḥrj-š=f, and the usual reading is "he who is upon his lake." Which is a fine name for a god whose city sat where it did, and which suggests a ram standing at the water's edge.

Then there is Plutarch, writing in Greek, who reports something else entirely. He is quoting a man called Ariston, who was quoting a letter by a man called Alexarchus, and the claim is that Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Isis and was called not Osiris but Arsaphes — the name denoting virility.

Third-hand, in the wrong language, about a different god, in an argument about what Osiris means.

I record it because it is genuinely in the record and because it is a nice specimen of how classical writers handled Egyptian religion: confidently, at several removes, and with an etymology attached. Whether the name means a lake or a phallus, this reference does not know, and neither did Plutarch.

Being annexed was his best-attested moment

The strongest passage about him is not about him.

There is a great hymn to Amon — the Theban god who became the state god of the empire — and it makes an argument that is close to monotheism, or at least to a very aggressive kind of consolidation. It runs through the sanctuaries of Egypt and says that in each one, Amon had gone and established himself as the god of that place.

At Heliopolis he had become Atum. At Memphis he had become Ptah. At Herakleopolis he had become Harsaphes.

And then the conclusion: not only are the gods forms of Amon — Amon is in all, and he is all.

Three of the oldest and most independent cults in Egypt, named in a row, and each one redescribed as a local appearance of the Theban god. Heryshaf is one of the three worth naming.

There is something bleak about a god whose most quotable moment is a hymn explaining that he is somebody else. But the hymn is also, in its way, a compliment. You do not bother annexing a god nobody cares about.

Filed under Khnum, and not on the evidence

The book that gives us most of this does not treat him as an independent god at all. It files him as one of two great forms of Khnemu, the ram-god of Elephantine — the potter who shapes bodies on a wheel.

The other of the two is the Ram of Mendes.

You can see the reasoning: three ram-gods, so one ram-god with three addresses. And you can see the problem: they are three ram-gods with three cities, three cults and three sets of local myth, and the resemblance is the animal, which in a country where gods routinely wear animals is not much of an argument.

This reference records the filing and declines to adopt it. Herakleopolis was a capital city. Its god was not a branch office.