A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. Arrives with the Book of the Dead.
Khemi
the 22nd assessor, and two Budges who disagree
Overview
One of the forty-two assessors who hear the Negative Confession in the hall of the Two Truths. He is twenty-second in the roster, and Budge once glosses his name:
"Hail, Khemiu (i.e., Destroyer), who comest forth from the Lake of Kaui, I have not encroached upon [sacred times and seasons]." [budge-1901]
"Destroyer" is worth having — most assessors' names are transcribed and left untranslated. That is the whole of the attested record: a name, a translation of it, a position, a town, and one sin. There is no myth, no cult, no independent iconography.
The witnesses do not agree
The same declaration in the Papyrus of Ani reads differently in both of the two places it matters:
"(22) Hail, Khemi, who comest forth from Kesui, I have not done that which is abominable." [budge-1895]
And the interlinear transliteration on the same sheet gives the sin a third time, differently again — "Khemiu, coming forth from Kesiu, not have I committed offence" [budge-1895].
| Town | Sin denied | |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1895], Ani, English | Kesui | "that which is abominable" |
[budge-1895], Ani, transliteration | Kesiu | "committed offence" |
[budge-1901], BD 125 | the Lake of Kaui | "encroached upon [sacred times and seasons]" |
Kesui / Kesiu / Kaui is a plausible spread for one place through OCR and Budge's shifting conventions. "That which is abominable" and "encroached upon sacred times and seasons" are not the same offence at all — one is a moral category, the other a calendrical trespass.
The entry names the disagreement rather than picking a reading. This is the same translator, working on the negative confession twice, six years apart. The variation is a fact about the sources, not about the god — and it is exactly why the corpus quotes witnesses separately instead of merging them.
Why this stays ○ name-only
The stub audit flagged this entry as under-graded against six hits. The six are:
1. Ani, the English translation of declaration 22. 2. Ani, the interlinear transliteration of the same line. 3. BD 125 (1901), the same declaration again. 4. Gods of the Egyptians I, the assessor list — position 22. 5. Gods of the Egyptians II, the hieroglyphic list "Gods of the Book of the Dead." 6. The Book of the Dead III index.
Six hits, one fact. Every one is the same declaration or a list derived from it. A hit count measures how often a name was printed, not how much is known about the being — and the grading rule is that a grade rises on a new attestation, not on more copies of the old one, and never on better prose. The grade is correct and the audit's heuristic is what needs the caveat (C384).
A name that is not his
Khemit — Gods of the Egyptians I, p. 222, in the Book of the Underworld — is a goddess, and a threatening one: whoever knows the right things, "Khemit shall not hack his body in pieces, and he shall go to her in peace" [budge-1904]. Adjacent spelling, different being, different text, different sex. Not merged.
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, assessor list, no. 22, p. 419 | the Egyptian name **Khemi** and the position |
[budge-1901] | BD 125, declaration 22 | **Khemiu**, glossed "**Destroyer**"; **the Lake of Kaui**; encroaching on sacred times and seasons |
[budge-1895] | *Papyrus of Ani*, ch. CXXV, declaration 22 | **Khemi**, from **Kesui**; "that which is abominable" |
[budge-1895] | *ibid.*, interlinear transliteration | **Khemiu**, from **Kesiu**; "committed offence" |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, p. 338 | **Khemi** in the hieroglyphic list of the Gods of the Book of the Dead |
[budge-1901v3] | *Book of the Dead* III, index | "**Khemi**, 369" |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, vols I–II (1904). Public domain, archived. A transcribed name list, which is where Budge is most dependable.[budge-1901]— Budge, BD 125, the Negative Confession. Public domain, archived.[budge-1895]— Budge, The Book of the Dead: Papyrus of Ani. Public domain, archived. Carries both an English translation and an interlinear transliteration of the same line, and they differ.[budge-1901v3]— Budge, The Book of the Dead: An English Translation, vol. III (1901). Public domain, archived. Index only.
Open questions
- Which sin? Two of Budge's own translations give different offences for declaration 22. Get a third witness — the Papyrus of Nu or the Turin recension — and see which reading it supports.
- Kesui / Kesiu / Kaui — one place or two? "Lake of Kaui" has the definite article and the others do not, which may mean the 1901 version is glossing rather than transliterating.
- Is "Destroyer" defensible? Budge glosses the name once and nowhere else. Test ḫm against a lexicon before repeating it.
- Recover BD III, p. 369. The index names him; the body's OCR does not yield the page.
- Confirm whether this is an independent being or an epithet. Several assessors in this roster turn out to be epithets in disguise — the trap has six known forms and this name has not been tested against them.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Khemi", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.