Wadj-wer wꜣḏ-wr

Wadj-wer means the Great Green. It is the ordinary Egyptian phrase for a large body of standing water, and it is usually translated "the sea."

And that is where the trouble starts, because "the great green" is a description of water before it is anyone's name — which means that when it turns up in a text, you cannot tell from the words alone whether you are reading about a god, a place, or just some water.

In this reference's books, it is all three. In one author. Sometimes on facing pages.

The god, with a pool under each hand

The clearest sighting is a picture, in the Papyrus of Ani — the most famous copy of the Book of the Dead there is.

The caption reads: the god Uatch-ura, "Great Green Water," with each hand extended over a pool.

And both pools are named. The one under his right hand is the Pool of Natron. The one under his left is the Pool of Salt.

Stop on that, because it is not what you would expect from a sea god.

Natron is a naturally occurring salt the Egyptians dug out of dried lake beds, and it is the single most important substance in mummification. A body was packed in it for forty days to draw the water out. Without natron there is no Egyptian mummy and arguably no Egyptian afterlife industry at all.

So here is a figure called Great Green Water, in a funeral papyrus, holding his hands out over the two substances that preserve a corpse. One in each hand.

Whether the text means anything by that, it does not say — and this reference is not going to say it for them. But it is a striking thing to find, and it is nothing to do with the Mediterranean.

The goddess, in the north

Now turn to a different book by the same scholar.

He is working through the Nile-god Hapi and asking who Hapi's female counterparts were. In the south, he says, it was the vulture goddess Nekhbet. And in the north:

"the ancient goddess Uatch-ura appears to have been the equivalent of Nekhbet in the South."

The goddess Uatch-ura. Same name, different sex, no comment. He does not mention the god in the Ani papyrus, does not notice the clash, and gives no reason for the gender either way.

This reference keeps both, exactly as written. It might be one deity whose gender was unstable — that happened in Egypt more than you would think. It might be two different figures that a nineteenth-century transliteration has flattened into one spelling. Nothing available here decides it, and picking one would be inventing a fact.

And a lake

Thirteen pages later, in the same volume:

"Near Henen-su were the two great mythological lakes called Heh and Uatch-ura."

His own index lists the two senses on separate lines, at separate pages — so on some level he knew there were two — and never connects them.

Why this one is worth reading even though we know so little

Because it is the clearest example in this whole reference of the problem that sits underneath everything else.

Ancient Egyptian is written without vowels and, in the nineteenth century, was transcribed into English letters by scholars who each had their own system. What comes out the other end is a string like Uatch-ura. And a string like that could be a god's name, a goddess's name, a town, a lake, a title somebody held, a piece of temple furniture, or an ordinary noun that happens to be capitalised because it started a sentence.

You cannot tell them apart by looking. You can only tell by reading what is around them — and sometimes, as here, what is around them says three different things.

A lake called the Great Green and a god called the Great Green are exactly what you would expect a language to produce. Sorting them out afterwards, three thousand years later, in translation, is most of the work.

One thing that is probably not true

Modern summaries call him the personification of the Mediterranean Sea, and a god of fertility.

Neither appears anywhere in the books read here. This scholar's Great Green is pools and inland lakes. The sea may well be right — it is the standard reading — but it is not in the evidence available, so it is written down as unconfirmed rather than repeated.