A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. In the record from the very beginning.
Hesat
a name in the Pyramid Texts, and nothing else
Overview
She is in the archive, and she is in it once. Budge's list of the Gods of the Pyramid Texts gives each name with the passage it occurs in, and hers reads in full:
Hesat (Pepi II. 976) [budge-1904]
That is the entry. A name, a hieroglyphic group, and a reference to line 976 of the pyramid of Pepi II. Budge does not discuss her, translate the name, describe her, or return to her anywhere in two volumes; the index confirms it with a single page number — "Hesat, i. 82," which is the list itself.
This is what ○ name-only is for. She is not unattested — she is in one of the oldest religious corpora in the world, in a king's pyramid, around 2250 BC. Nothing more than her presence there is recoverable from this archive.
What the census claims, and what is missing
The census calls her "a maternal cow goddess." That is the standard identification — Hesat as the cow who suckles, mother of the Apis bull in later texts, associated with milk. None of it appears in these sources. Budge's list gives no epithet and no determinative reading that the OCR preserves.
The cow-goddess description is recorded here as unconfirmed, not repeated as fact. It may be entirely right; this corpus has not seen the evidence for it.
What would change this
The Pyramid Text reference is specific and checkable — Pepi II, line 976. That is not a vague pointer; it is a citation to a numbered line in a published text. Maspero's Inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah is in this archive and covers the Pepi pyramids, and Sethe's edition and any modern translation (Faulkner, Allen) would give the sentence she stands in. One line of one spell would take this entry from a name to a context.
The corpus records the pointer rather than guessing what it points at.
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, "Gods of the Pyramid Texts," p. 82 | "**Hesat (Pepi II. 976)**" — the name and its Pyramid Text locus |
[budge-1904] | *ibid.*, vol. II index | "**Hesat, i. 82**" — the list entry and no other occurrence |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vols I–II. Public domain, archived. A transcribed name list with locus references, which is Budge at his most dependable — he is recording, not interpreting.
Open questions
- Read Pepi II. 976. The single most valuable thing anyone could do for this entry, and it is a specific line in a published text.
- Is she the cow? Establish the cow-goddess identification from a primary source, or record it as a later development. The Apis connection in particular is worth testing — apis is in this corpus and his mother is a real question.
hesetalready points here. Confirm no third spelling is loose in the census.- Check the neighbours in Budge's list. Names are grouped alphabetically there, not thematically, so proximity means nothing — but the Pepi II line numbers around 976 may cluster, and if several gods share a spell that spell is worth reading whole (C362).
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Hesat", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.