Sopdu spdw

Sopdu is a good demonstration of how a name can be everywhere and nowhere at once.

The books on this shelf mention him ninety-four times. He was also, until today, filed here as an unresearched name that nothing could be found for — twice over, because the master list carried him as two separate gods.

Both of those things were true at the same time, and the reason is a spelling.

Two entries, one god

The list this reference is auditing had Sopdu — "a god of the sky and of Egypt's eastern border regions" — and, separately, Septu — "a bearded, plume-wearing god."

Those are the same deity. The Egyptian is roughly spdw, and the Victorian scholar whose books make up most of this shelf writes him Sept.

So the list had him twice, under two modern-ish spellings, and the books had him ninety-four times under a third that neither entry used. Nobody was wrong, exactly. The name simply never lined up with itself.

Where he actually turns up

In chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead — the chapter that keeps interrupting itself to explain what it just said — there is a moment where the text asks who somebody is, and then offers four answers in a row:

…or, as others say, it is the great Horus who dwells in Sekhem; or, as others say, it is Thoth; or, as others say, it is Nefer-Tem — or Sept — who thwarts the course of the foes of Neb-er-tcher.

Four candidates. None of them rejected.

This is worth pausing on, because it is one of the most attractive features of Egyptian religious writing and it has no real equivalent in the traditions most readers grow up with. Where the tradition disagreed, the scribe wrote down the disagreement. He did not pick a winner, and he did not hide the argument. He listed the options and moved on.

And the job Sopdu is given is oddly precise. He thwarts the course of the foes of Neb-er-tcher — "the Lord to the uttermost limit," the god who is the totality of things. Sopdu is not fighting for himself. He is interference, run on behalf of everything that exists.

Mostly he is a compound

Here is the pattern that makes him hard to see.

On the roof of a shrine in the most famous Book of the Dead papyrus there is a figure the translator identifies as "Horus-Sept, or Horus-Seker" — he cannot tell which, and says so.

In a set of colour plates there is a goddess captioned "Isis-Sept."

So on this shelf he is joined to Horus, joined to Isis, and standing alone only inside a gloss explaining somebody else. That is the profile of a name-element rather than a personality — a piece that attaches to bigger gods and modifies them.

Which may be exactly wrong. Egyptology generally treats Sopdu as a god in his own right: a falcon of the eastern desert and the Sinai, guardian of the frontier where Egypt stops and Asia starts, paired with the star that announced the flood.

None of that is in these eighteen books. It may well be true. It is written down here as a claim from the list rather than repeated as a fact, because the difference between those two things is the only thing this reference actually sells.

The part that should make you slightly uneasy

He was recovered because somebody guessed a spelling.

That is not a method. It worked three times in one afternoon — Sopdu, and a sky goddess called Mehet-Weret, and a sea god called Wadj-wer — and every one of them had been sitting in the "cannot be found" pile while the books named them dozens of times under a Victorian spelling.

So the guessing has since been replaced by something that can be checked: a tool that generates the old spellings from the modern ones and tests them, and that refuses to be trusted unless it can first re-find the three that were already confirmed by hand.

It currently says ten more names in that pile have a promising variant. Several of those will turn out to be ordinary words — nebt just means "lady of," kerh means "night" — which is why each one has to be read in its passage before anybody writes a page about it.

But the shape of the thing has changed. The remainder is not a list of gods that cannot be reached. It is mostly a list of gods whose names were spelled by somebody who died in 1934.