Mehit

What the census claims

A warrior lioness goddess originally from Nubia worshiped at Abydos, consort of Onuris

Source: the aggregate list the census was built from. Per 00-README.md rule 4, that is sufficient to show a name is in circulation and never sufficient to show it is attested.

What was searched, and what was found

Searched 2026-07-30 — the name and its generated Budge-era variants, whole-word and hyphen-insensitive, against every archived source:

budge-1895 Papyrus of Ani · budge-1901 BD 125 · budge-1901v3 BD English vol. III · budge-1904 Gods of the Egyptians I–II · budge-1905 Am-Tuat I · budge-1905 Book of Gates II · budge-1906 Egyptian Heaven and Hell · budge-1914 Literature of the Ancient Egyptians · mariette-1882 Sérapéum de Memphis · maspero-1894 Inscriptions des Pyramides · maspero-1912 Hymne au Nil · naville-1886 Todtenbuch Einleitung · petrie-1895 ×2 · herodotus · plutarch · breasted-1912 — 18 sources in all

Eight hits, and ten occurrences of the string sit inside a different name. Almost every one is Hat-Mehit — the fish-goddess of Mendes, female counterpart of Ba-neb-Tettu and mother of Heru-pa-khart [budge-1904] — who has her own census entry at hatmehit.

The word index splits on hyphens, so every Hat-Mehit donates a mehit token. This is compound-token bleed (C342), and it is invisible to the collision check because the winning term genuinely is "Mehit."

One occurrence is arguably independent: a nome-and-goddess list pairing "Mehit-Tefnut" at This (Thinis), beside Sefkhet-Aabut at Diospolis Parva [budge-1904]. A lioness goddess paired with Tefnut is plausible and is not nothing — but one list entry, with the name hyphenated to another goddess, will not carry an entry. Recorded so the next reader starts from the right place rather than from eight.

⚠ 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.

Why this is not graded higher

The grade stays ☐ because nothing is attested. It carries the searched-not-found chip because the search happened, was thorough, and produced a result: the name is in the archive, and it is not a god there.

What would recover it

Leitz, Lexikon der ägyptischen Götter und Götterbezeichnungen (LGG) — the only reference that indexes divine names and epithets at a scale that could show whether this name is attested as a deity anywhere. Named as a fallback, not as a specific lead: no source archived here points at one.