The Her-Hequi

Four gods walk in front of the sun boat in the fifth hour of the night. Budge's Am-Tuat translation says who they are and what they are for:

the great sovereign chiefs who provide food in this Circle [budge-1905-amtuat]

Sovereign chiefs. Providing food. At the deepest point of the sun's night journey, four high-ranking gods are running the commissariat.

The four

They march "under the guidance of Isis of Amentet" [budge-1905-amtuat] — Isis in her western, funerary aspect. Four sovereign chiefs reporting to a goddess is a specified chain of command, which the Tuat registers rarely bother to give.

None of the four is on the 497-name census. The census carries the group, under the name of its third member.

The group is named after one of its members

The census entry reads: "The Her-Hequi — four deities in the fifth division of Duat." That is Heru-hequi's name, applied to all four.

It appears to be accurate as far as it goes — the sources archived here give the four no collective name at all, so a label had to come from somewhere. But the effect is that three gods are indexed under a fourth one's name and none of them appears individually.

This is the same pattern found with the Akhemu-seku and the Companies of the Eleventh Division: aggregate lists carry the group label and drop the roster.

The objects are the content

With no speech surviving and only one head type recorded, what these four gods have is what they are holding. And the set is oddly informative.

Staff, sceptre, crook — three emblems of authority, in ascending order of significance. The crook is heqa, the shepherd's implement that Osiris and every pharaoh carries. Heru-hequi's name contains the same root, so the third chief is named rule and holds rule.

And then a tree.

The fourth god breaks the set completely. Not an emblem of office — a source of food and shade, carried in the left hand.

Read the four together and the group makes an argument: authority is exercised by provisioning. The crook is a shepherd's tool; a shepherd's power is expressed by feeding. Egyptian kingship used pastoral imagery for precisely that reason, and here it is staged in the underworld with the food itself made visible in the last god's hand.

There is also a real tree tradition to connect it to. Hathor and Nut both appear leaning out of a sycamore at the desert edge, pouring water for the dead as they pass. A food-providing god of the fifth circle carrying a tree plausibly belongs there. No archived source says so, and it is offered as a reading.

Feeding the dead is administration

The fifth hour makes the logistics explicit. Budge: "In this division, as in the others, Ra addresses the beings who are in it, and makes arrangements for their supply of food, and reminds them of their duties to him their creator" [budge-1904].

This is not spiritual sustenance. The Egyptian dead needed feeding — the entire mortuary cult, with its offering formulas, its estates, its priests, existed to deliver bread and beer to people who had died. The underworld books describe the same operation conducted at divine scale, with named officers and a supervisor.

Hetep, the word in the second chief's name, is the word on every offering table in Egypt. It means offering, and it means peace, and it means being satisfied — one word for a plate of food and a state of contentment.

What is missing

Ra's speech to them is lost. "The text containing the address of the Sun-god to the seven gods is broken away" [budge-1905-amtuat]. Every other register this corpus has expanded preserved the god's address; this one does not, and the four chiefs are consequently silent.

And Budge cannot keep the fourth one's name straight. He is Ut-metu in the 1905 Book of Am-Tuat and Hetch-met in the 1904 Gods of the Egyptians — the same figure, same position, same scene, two books by the same author, and the two transcriptions share almost nothing. Until that is resolved, one quarter of this group cannot be named with confidence.

The rest of the fifth hour

For context, because it is the strangest division in the book. Beyond the four chiefs, Ra comes to a mound of sand topped by the head of a woman, on which rests the forepart of a beetle — "only one half of which is visible" [budge-1904]. The head marks the hidden abode of Seker, and when the beetle alights the god Khepera holds converse with him.

Inside the walled Land of Seker is a two-headed winged serpent whose tail ends in a human head, with the hawk-headed Seker standing between its wings. Nine chapels hold mummified gods, "the gods who are in the train of Osiris in their caves." Twelve women in two groups of six personify the hours, and a serpent called Herert coils among them, "said to give birth to twelve young ones to devour the hours" [budge-1904].

The pylon of this division is Arit, guarded by the serpent Teka-hra; the corridor is held by two jackal-headed mummies, Aau and Tekemi [budge-1904].

None of those is on the census either.

Sources

• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. I, Fifth Hour of the Book of the Underworld, p. 222. Public domain, archived in sources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md).
• [budge-1905-amtuat] — Budge, The Book of Am-Tuat (1905), vol. I, fifth circle. Public domain, archived in sources-texts/.
• [wilkinson-2003] — Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.

Open threads

• Settle the fourth chief's name. Ut-metu or Hetch-met. Highest priority here — a quarter of the group is currently unnameable.
• Recover Ra's address from another Amduat witness. The Amduat survives in many tombs; what is broken in one copy usually survives in another, and the speech would likely double what is known about all four.
• Establish whether the group has a collective name in the Egyptian text, or whether the census's use of the third member's name is the only label available.
• Confirm the hequi / heqa / crook connection with a lexicon.
• Identify the tree species if the drawing is specific — a sycamore would connect the fourth chief to the Hathor and Nut tree-goddess tradition.
• Expand the rest of the fifth hour: Arit, Teka-hra, Aau, Tekemi, Herert, the nine gods in caves and the twelve hour-women are all named here and none is on the census.