Renpet

Identified

Group: the names of Isis, city by city [budge-1904]. Budge: "another important list tells us that Isis was called Ament in Thebes, Menhet in Heliopolis, Renpet in Memphis, Sept in Abydos, Hetet in Behutet, Hurt in Nekhen, Thenenet in Hermonthis, Ant in Dendera, Sesheta in Hermopolis, Heqet in Hibiu, Uatchit in Hipponus, Mernekhen in Herakleopolis, Renpet in Crocodilopolis**, Neb-tept in Arsinoe, That or Tchetut in Aphroditopolis, and Shetat in Bubastis."

Under the companies rule (C246) this is a pointer rather than an entry.

She appears twice in the same list

Renpet is given for Memphis and again for Crocodilopolis — the only name repeated in sixteen cities. Budge does not remark on it.

Two readings are available and the corpus picks neither. Either the same local name was in use in two towns, or the list has absorbed a duplicate. The hieroglyphs differ slightly between the two entries in Budge's transcription, which is a reason to be careful rather than a reason to decide.

The list is the finding, not the name

This is the third city-by-city identification list the corpus has met — Hathor's (which closed repyt), the goddesses-by-city survey, and now Isis'. They work the same way: a great goddess is declared to be the local goddess of town after town, and the local name survives only as an entry in the list.

So a name like Renpet tells you a city, and a claim, and almost nothing about a person. Whether there was ever a distinct goddess Renpet at Memphis whom Isis absorbed, or whether Renpet was only ever an epithet Isis bore there, this passage cannot say — and it is the only passage the archive has.

Not the same as the ordinary word

Renpet is also common Egyptian vocabulary — it appears in an offering formula in the Hymn to Osiris as part of "gifts of herbs of all kinds," where it has nothing to do with a goddess [budge-1904]. A search for this name returns the noun far more often than the deity. Trap form 3 — an element used both ways; see the Epithet Trap.