We could not trace this name to a source we trust. The page is the investigation.
Ur-heka
audit verdict: this is an instrument
What was found
Budge's own index separates the object from the god, on consecutive lines:
Ur-heka instrument, 39 Ur-hekau, 130, 133, 595 [budge-1901v3]
Ur-heka is a ritual implement. Ur-hekau — "great of magic," with the plural ending — is the divine name, and it is a different word in the same index, four lines apart.
The one occurrence in the body of the text uses the divine form and calls it a god explicitly:
thou refreshest thyself on the branch of the merit tree on both sides of the god Ur-hekau. The goddess Seshetet sitteth before thee, the god Sa protecteth thy members… [budge-1901v3, BD ch. CLXIX]
So the census slug ur-heka matches the tool, not the deity. The deity it was reaching for already exists in this corpus under the fuller form.
What the census claims
Nothing. No description was carried with the name — which, in hindsight, is what a scraped index line looks like.
Where the instrument belongs
Page 39 of that volume is in the Opening of the Mouth material — the ceremony in which implements are touched to the mummy's face to restore the senses. The ur-heka is one of the implements. It has a name, it does work in a ritual, and it is not a person.
An object that acts in a ritual is easy to mistake for an actor. That is the whole finding, and it is the same one as neb-pehti, caught in the same batch: a door and a tool, both named, both filed as gods.
Verdict — identified, not a deity
In plain English: this is a piece of ritual equipment, and the god with the similar name is spelled differently and is already in the corpus.
The epithet trap's seventh form (C394): a named object or piece of architecture read as a deity. See the Epithet Trap. The previous six are title × roster (C290), compound first element (C300), an element used both ways (C310), variant collision in search (C336), toponym + feminine ending (C343), and priestly office (C347).
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1901v3] | *Book of the Dead* III, index | "**Ur-heka instrument**, 39" — and separately "**Ur-hekau**, 130, 133, 595" |
[budge-1901v3] | *ibid.*, BD ch. CLXIX | "**the god Ur-hekau**," beside the goddess Seshetet and the god Sa — the **divine** form, spelled with the plural ending |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, "Gods of the Book of the Dead" list | **Ur-hekau** appears; **Ur-heka** does not |
Sources
[budge-1901v3]— Budge, The Book of the Dead: An English Translation, vol. III (1901). Public domain, archived. His index distinguishes the instrument from the god by spelling and by label, which is the whole of the evidence and is unusually clean.[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. II. Public domain, archived.
Open questions
- Read page 39 and get the ur-heka instrument described in the Opening of the Mouth sequence. It is a real object with a real function and deserves a line somewhere, just not on a god page.
- Does the corpus have
ur-hekau/urt-hekau? The Gods of the Egyptians index gives "Urt-hekau, i. 80, 456; ii. 111, 256, 362" — six loci for a goddess "great of magic." Check the census and link, or write her. That is the real deity behind this slug. - How many other implements are in the census? The Opening of the Mouth uses a set of named tools. Worth a systematic look alongside the door-names (see neb-pehti).
Cite this entry
Research grade: ⚠audit — Attestation could not be verified. This entry is the audit.
This entry should not be cited as a description of a deity. It records an unverified name and the state of the investigation into it.
"Ur-heka", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded audit, retrieved 2026-08-10.