A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work.
Medjed mḏd
the smiter, from a vignette
Overview
Medjed appears in a vignette to Book of the Dead chapter 17 — a small draped figure with two eyes and protruding feet, otherwise featureless.
He is not in any source this reference has read, and the reason is identifiable: the archived Book of the Dead is the Papyrus of Ani, and the Medjed vignette is from the Greenfield Papyrus.
What was searched, and what was found
The whole archive was searched on 2026-07-29 — Budge's Gods of the Egyptians (both volumes), the Papyrus of Ani, the Book of Am-Tuat, the Book of Gates, Petrie's Egyptian Tales, and Mariette's Sérapéum de Memphis.
Terms tried: Medjed, Metchet.
Result: nothing. This entry records that search rather than leaving the name looking merely unvisited.
Why he was missed, precisely. The corpus holds [budge-1895], the Papyrus of Ani. Medjed is in the Greenfield Papyrus. Two witnesses to the same composition, with different vignettes — which is a useful caution for every Book of the Dead claim made here.
Why this matters
A stub can mean two different things, and the difference is worth marking. It can mean nobody has looked yet — or it can mean somebody looked properly and the sources do not contain this.
This is the second kind. The name is real and stands on the census; the evidence for it is simply outside the material this reference has read. What is needed is named below, so the next attempt starts from a source rather than from a search that has already failed.
⚠ What this search did NOT cover
The sweep generated vowel-shifted variants of the modern spelling. It could not produce Greek forms (Arsaphes for Heryshaf, Imouthes for Imhotep) or Budge's hyphenated compounds (Ba-neb-Tettu for Banebdjedet, Heru-shefit for Heryshaf).
That gap has produced demonstrably wrong verdicts: Heryshaf scored one hit while attested in four sources under six spellings, and Banebdjedet was graded absent while Ba-neb-Tettu appears nine times. A hand-kept alternates table now covers the names that could be identified by hand — but it cannot be complete, and this entry was not individually checked against a Greek or compound form.
Read this as "not found under the spellings searched," not as "not in the archive." See C365 and C366.
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vols I–II. Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Searched; see above.[budge-1895]— Budge, The Papyrus of Ani (1895). Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Searched; see above.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- Get the Greenfield Papyrus. That is where the Medjed vignette is, and it is a
- Establish the "smiter" reading, and whether the name is attached to the figure in the
- Determine whether Medjed appears in any recension other than the Greenfield.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Medjed", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.