Imsety jmstj

Overview

Imsety is the one with the human face.

Of the four gods who guard the viscera of the dead, three are given animal heads — ape, jackal, hawk — and Imsety alone keeps a man's. He takes the south, and he protects the stomach and large intestines [budge-1904].

He is also the first-named of the four in nearly every list, which in Egyptian practice usually means something.

Attestation history

Old Kingdom. Budge's roster of gods named in the Pyramid Texts gives Amset at Teta 60 and 197 [budge-1904] — an Old Kingdom attestation, and among the earliest for any funerary deity.

The four are called "the children of Horus" in the Pyramid Texts, where they "played a prominent part in connexion with the deceased": at one point summoned to bring him the boat of the Eye of Tem on the Lake of Kha, at another "exhorted to protect his life by their magical power and amulets," and finally, at Pepi I l. 672, the deceased "is said to become one of these four gods" [budge-1904].

Book of the Dead. Imsety is among the four gods who stand on a lotus before the enthroned Osiris in the judgment scene [budge-1904]. In chapter cli. A he speaks to the deceased, telling him that he has "stablished his house firmly" [budge-1904].

With Isis. Isis is his protecting counterpart, and the formula is first-person: "I conquer the foe, I make protection for Amseth who is in me" [budge-1904]. The phrasing is worth noting — who is in me. The goddess is the jar.

The Souls of Pe. Budge records that "the Souls of the city of Pe were Horus, Mestha, and Hapi" (Book of the Dead ch. cxii) [budge-1904] — so Imsety is also one of the deified predynastic rulers of the Delta capital. See the Souls of Pe and Nekhen.

What the texts say

The four are one system, and it is unusually tidy. Each son takes a cardinal point, a set of organs, a head, and a protecting goddess:

Budge gives the directions and organs in vol. I and the heads from the judgment scene of the Papyrus of Ani in vol. II [budge-1904].

Why a human head. The sources here do not explain it, and this entry will not invent a reason. What can be said is that the asymmetry is deliberate and stable across centuries: whoever fixed this scheme wanted one of the four to look like a person, and put him first.

The body was distributed. Budge records that "the two arms of the deceased were identified with Hapi and Tuamutef, and his two legs with Amset and Qebhsennuf; and when he went into the Sekhet-Aaru they were his guides and went in with him, two on each side" [budge-1904].

So the four are not merely custodians of organs in jars. They are limbs. The dead person walks into the field of reeds on gods.

Iconography

A mummiform figure with a human head, most familiar as a canopic jar lid [budge-1904]. In the judgment scene he stands with his three brothers on a lotus before Osiris, the lotus sometimes rooted in a stream running from beneath the god's throne.

Budge notes that the four children of Horus are the "gods with long flowing hair… each of whom wore a lock or tress" [budge-1904].

Cult and practice

No temple. Imsety's practice is the canopic jar — one of a set of four, placed in the burial chamber, holding an organ removed during embalming.

That makes him among the most materially attested gods in Egypt. Canopic sets survive in very large numbers, and every complete one contains him.