Nebt-ankh

Nebt-ankh means Lady of Life. She turns up in two completely different places, and the interesting thing about her is not either one — it is what happens when you check how many times she actually appears.

First place: twelfth in a line

In the first hour of the night, in the Egyptian book describing the sun's journey underground, there is a register of twelve figures.

Numbers seven and eight have names you can see: Uatch-hra, which means "Green Face", and Hetep, who is carrying the crook of Osiris. Nine, ten and eleven each hold an ankh — the looped cross that means life — and are called Sem-ankh, An-her and Ut-met.

And number twelve is the goddess Nebt-ankh.

That is all. A name, a position, and eleven neighbours. No action, no speech, no description of what she looks like.

Second place: a line in a hymn

Somewhere else entirely, in a hymn sung to the sun god, there is a moment of celebration. The great serpent enemy has just been stabbed. And the hymn runs through everybody who is pleased about it:

The gods rejoice. The sailors of Ra are satisfied. Heliopolis rejoices. The enemies of Temu are overthrown. Thebes is at peace. The heart of Nebt-ankh is happy, because the enemies of her Lord have been overthrown. And the gods of Kher-aha bow down.

Which is a much better sentence to have than a position in a list. She has a lord. She has a heart. She is glad when his enemy falls.

Now the part worth learning from

That hymn line shows up in three different books.

The scholar who assembled most of this material translated it once in his edition of a papyrus, once in a general book about the gods, and once in an anthology of Egyptian literature. Three books, three slightly different English renderings, across nineteen years.

It is the same sentence every time. One line of Egyptian, quoted thrice.

A search of the shelf turns up four occurrences of her name and it feels like evidence piling up. It is not. It is one piece of evidence photocopied. And that is a mistake that is genuinely easy to make and genuinely hard to catch, because the three books look independent — different titles, different years, different wording — and a name appearing "in three sources" sounds like something solid.

The only way to catch it is to actually open all three and read what is around the line. Which is slower, and is the whole method.

And now the good bit

Here is what reading all three actually bought.

In one of those books, the translator adds a parenthesis. He writes: the heart of Nebt-Ankh — (i.e., Isis) — is happy.

Just like that. A quiet aside identifying her as the most famous goddess in Egypt.

In the other two books, printing the same line, he says nothing at all. He gives the sentence, moves on, and never suggests she is Isis or anyone else.

So: he had three opportunities to make the identification and made it once. It is not in the Egyptian. It is not argued for. It is not repeated. It is a scholar's passing hunch, dropped into one book, which then gets copied into handbooks and eventually turns into a fact.

You are allowed to think he was right. He knew far more than most. But there is a difference between "the text says she is Isis" and "a man once wrote i.e. Isis in brackets and did not do it the other two times", and every reference book that flattens the second into the first is making the record worse.

One more clue, and it points somewhere else

Look again at who is celebrating in that stanza.

Anu. That is Heliopolis — a city. The Apts. That is the Karnak temple district at Thebes — a place. Kher-aha. Another locality, near modern Cairo.

Three of the four things rejoicing alongside her are towns, personified.

Which raises an entirely different possibility: that Nebt-ankh in this hymn is not a goddess at all but a place — a necropolis or a temple district — being described as glad, the way the text has just described Heliopolis and Thebes as glad.

Egypt did this constantly. Add a feminine ending to a city name and you have a goddess of that city, and in transliteration you cannot tell which one you are looking at.

So the honest position is this. There is a figure called Lady of Life standing twelfth in a register in the underworld. There is a Lady of Life whose heart is glad in a hymn, surrounded by rejoicing cities. They may be the same. Either may be Isis. Either may be a town. And the one man who could have told us guessed once, in brackets, and then twice declined to.