Seshat sšꜣt

Seshat turns up in the sources under four different descriptions, and at first they look like four different goddesses.

She is "the lady of writing," a female counterpart of Thoth.

She is "the lady of the buildings."

She is a local form of Isis at Hermopolis.

And she is a door — the first Circle of the underworld in the eighth hour of the night, behind which the images of Tem, Khepera and Shu are shut, and which answers when Ra speaks to it in a voice "which resembles the humming of bees."

Three of those four I think are one idea. The fourth is a genuine problem, and I will come to it.

The pen and the cord

Writing and building sound like separate departments to us. They were not in Egypt.

When a temple was founded, the ceremony was called the stretching of the cord. The king and a goddess took a measuring line and set out the ground plan by sighting on the stars, fixing the corners before a single stone was laid. That is a surveying operation, and it is also an act of inscription — you are marking a surface accurately so that something can be made from the marks.

Which is exactly what writing is.

So a goddess who is "lady of writing" in one text and "lady of the buildings" in another is not being confused with somebody. She is the faculty of getting something down exactly — on papyrus in one place, on the ground in another.

I should be straight that the stretching-of-the-cord ceremony is not in any source this reference has read. It is her most famous function in modern Egyptology and it is flagged as a gap on her page. But the two epithets sitting side by side in Budge point at it without needing it.

The difficult one

Now the passage that does not fit, and it comes from one of the oldest religious texts in existence — the pyramid of King Teta.

Nephthys hath united again for thee thy members in her name of Sesheta, the lady of the buildings through which thou hast passed.

Read that carefully. This is not Seshat standing next to Nephthys. Sesheta is here a name of Nephthys — a title she takes when she is doing a particular job.

And the job is reassembling a dismembered body.

Osiris was cut apart. His sisters put him back together. That line is addressed to a dead king being given the same service, and the name Nephthys uses while doing it is lady of the buildings.

A body being reconstructed, member by member, in the correct arrangement. Under a building title.

I do not know whether the writing goddess and this Nephthys-name are the same figure. Budge never connects them — they sit in different chapters and he does not remark on the overlap. The honest position is that the corpse and the temple are being described with the same vocabulary, and that this may be significant or may be two unrelated uses of a common word.

But it is hard to read lady of the buildings over a body being put back together and not think that Egypt considered a person to be, among other things, a structure that has to be assembled correctly.

Four things with one name

Sesheta in Budge is a goddess of writing, a name of Nephthys, a local Isis, and a door in the underworld.

This reference has been keeping a list of these. Three different deities are transliterated Nut — the sky goddess, the primeval mother, and a substitute name for a male god of the Ogdoad. Two entirely unrelated gods are called Hapi. A company of four underworld beings is Khnemiu, one letter from Khnemu, the great ram-god of Elephantine.

Seshat is the widest yet, at four.

That is partly a real feature of Egyptian religion, where names were reused and gods merged freely. But it is also an artefact of reading a 1904 book: Budge transliterated from many sources over two volumes without normalising, and a name that looks identical in his English may be several different words in Egyptian.

Which is a caution about the whole enterprise, and worth saying on the page of the goddess of writing things down accurately.

What she does not have

No temple in these sources. No festival. No priesthood. Not one description of what she looks like.

Every reader who knows her already knows the image — a woman in a panther skin, a scribe's palette in her hand, and above her head a strange seven-pointed emblem under an inverted crescent that nobody has satisfactorily explained.

None of that is in anything this reference has read.

So her page carries no picture and says why. Which is, I think, the right way to treat the goddess of exact record: not to fill in from memory what the sources do not supply.