Montu mnṯw

Egyptian solar theology is overwhelmingly about renewal.

Khepri is the sun coming into being, named after a verb for becoming. Ra crosses. Atum completes and begins again. Nut swallows the disc each evening and gives birth to it each morning. The whole apparatus is built around the idea that the light comes back.

Montu is the sun considered as the thing that kills you in a field at noon.

Budge, in one clause: "he appears to have been a personification of the destructive heat of the sun."

Not the light. The heat. The same star, filed under harm.

Why that needed its own god

I think this is a genuinely sophisticated piece of theology and it is easy to walk past.

The sun in Egypt does two incompatible things. It ripens the crop and it kills the traveller. It makes the year work and it makes the desert uninhabitable.

You could fold that contradiction into one deity and let it sit there — plenty of religions do. Egypt instead split it off and gave the dangerous half a separate god with his own city.

Which is the same instinct visible everywhere else in this material: when two things genuinely differ, give them separate names and keep both. Five creation stories. Three ages of Horus. A god of the dark before dawn and a different god of the dark after dusk.

Montu is the sun's other job.

Heliopolis of the South

His real home was not Thebes, despite the title he usually carries.

Budge: "though he was commonly described as 'lord of Thebes,' the chief seat of his worship was at Hermonthis, the Annu-Rest — 'Heliopolis of the South.'"

That place-name is an argument. Annu — Heliopolis — was the seat of Atum and of the oldest solar theology in Egypt, the place whose priests had spent a thousand years establishing that the world began there.

A town in Upper Egypt calling itself the southern Heliopolis is not being modest. It is staking a claim to the sun.

And Thebes had to deal with him

Which brings us to why Montu matters beyond his own cult.

Budge, again with unusual directness:

Menthu was probably an old local god whose cult was sufficiently important to make it necessary for the priests of Amen to incorporate him with the great god of Thebes.

That word — necessary — is the interesting one.

This reference has now watched the priests of Amun do this five separate times. They took Khonsu, an ancient moon god, and made him Amun's son, borrowing an antiquity Amun did not have. They took Mut, whose oldest layer is the counterpart of the primeval water, and made her his wife. They inserted Amun into the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, displacing an existing pair. They borrowed Min's entire body — posture, raised arm, flail and title — whenever Amun needed to be shown as a generative power.

And they incorporated Montu, because he was too important to leave standing outside.

Five acquisitions, and not one of them an invention. Thebes never made anything up. It identified what it lacked and went and got it, from priesthoods that already had it.

He outlasted the takeover

The last detail is a small one that I like.

Among Budge's illustrations is a scene captioned "Menthu giving 'life' to Ptolemy Alexander."

So a thousand years after the priests of Amun absorbed him — after Thebes rose and fell, after Egypt was taken by Persians and then by Macedonians — a Greek king is still being shown receiving life from the god of the burning sun of Hermonthis.

Absorption, in this system, never seems to mean erasure. Montu was incorporated into Amun and went on being Montu. The Ogdoad kept running beside the Ennead. Five cities each went on claiming the world began there.

Egypt did not resolve things. It accumulated them, and everything it had ever believed stayed on the payroll.