The Names of the Hours

Source section: the Book of Gates, vol. II, Summary — which names every hour consecutively; with parallels in the Book of Am-Tuat and in Budge's 1904 summary of the Book of the Underworld Related: ra · neb-t-usha · sekhemus · apophis · osiris · the Twelve Hours · the Eighth Division · the Twelfth Division

The twelve

The hours of the night are goddesses, and each one has a name. Every one of the twelve survives. Here they are, with the Book of Gates summary as the spine and the variants beside them:

The formula

Eleven of the twelve arrive in the same sentence, at the end of each hour's summary:

X is the name of the hour of the night which guideth this great god through this Field / Circle / country. [budge-1905-gates]

The hour guides. It is not a container the journey happens inside; it is the thing steering. That grammar is consistent across three books and it is the reason these names belong in a reference about gods at all.

Why they took so long to find

This reference concluded, twice, that most of them did not exist.

Batch 98 searched both archived scans of the Book of Am-Tuat, at every chapter boundary, and found the formula in seven divisions. The conclusion recorded was that the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth "carry none — that is the structure of the text as Budge presents it, not OCR loss" (C400). The reading was exhaustive and the inference was wrong.

Batch 105 found the Fourth in a third book — Gods of the Egyptians vol. I names it Sekhemus — and corrected the count to eight, noting that the earlier claim had been "stated as though it bounded the text" when it bounded two books (C414).

Batch 106 searched all eighteen sources and found all twelve. They are in the Book of Gates, vol. II, in a Summary section that lists them consecutively, one per hour, in the standard formula. Not scattered. Not damaged. In a list, in a book the corpus had held all along (C417).

What actually went wrong

The first search was thorough within the Am-Tuat, and the Am-Tuat genuinely does give the formula in only seven of its divisions. Every fact in that check was correct. What was wrong was the sentence built on it — "that is the structure of the text" — which quietly promoted these two books to the record.

Two rounds of correction were needed because the first one repeated the shape of the error. C414 widened the claim from two books to three and still framed the remainder as "missing from the books searched." The right move, available at that point, was to search the shelf. A bounded negative should trigger a wider search, not a narrower footnote.

The seventh hour's name, settled

The corpus has carried an open question since batch 98: the Seventh Hour reads Kheftes-hau-hesqet on one page and Kheftes-nau-hesqet in the scan, and neither could be confirmed (C401).

Neither is right. The Book of Gates gives it as Khesef-hai-heseq-Neha-hra — and Khesef is an ordinary Egyptian word meaning to repel, drive back. The name is a clause about repelling, and the thing repelled is named in the very next sentence:

the serpent Neha-hra shall not drink his water… and whosoever knoweth it the crocodile Ab-shau shall not devour his soul. [budge-1905-gates]

The Seventh Hour is "she who drives back Neha-hra." The Am-Tuat's Kheftes-nau-hesqet is a mangling of the same name, and the hau/nau question was a choice between two corruptions.

What the names say

Read as a set, they are not decorative. Most are verbs.

• The First crushes the forehead of the enemies of Ra.
• The Seventh drives back Neha-hra.
• The Eleventh repels the fiends at his coming forth — khesef-sebiu-em-pert-f.
• The Second and Ninth share -maket-neb-s, "protectress of her lord."
• The Twelfth, at dawn, is Maa-nefert-Ra — seeing the beauty of Ra.

Eleven hours of guarding, and then one of looking at him. The night is a shift roster of armed women, and the last one is the one who gets to see the sunrise.

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Primary attestations

Sources

• [budge-1905-gates] — Budge, The Book of Gates (1905), vol. II. Public domain, archived. The Summary section is the only place in the archive where the hours are named consecutively; the scan of these pages is poor and the names survive it because they are set in capitals.
• [budge-1905] — Budge, The Book of Am-Tuat (1905), vol. I. Public domain, archived.
• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. I. Public domain, archived. His summary carries hour-names his own translations do not.

Open threads

• Translate all twelve. Four are glossed or transparent; the rest are clauses nobody has rendered. A full translation would turn a list of names into a description of the night.
• Are the Am-Tuat and Book of Gates hours the same goddesses? The names match closely enough that they are plainly one tradition — but Mak-neb-s and Tuatet-maketet-en-neb-s are not identical strings, and the corpus has been burned by less (C336).
• The Twelfth is absent from the Gates summary as read; it comes from the Am-Tuat. Confirm whether the summary simply ends at the Eleventh.
• Where does the Leyden Papyrus T. 71 fit? The Gates summary cites it for the Eighth Hour onward and the Tomb of Seti I for the earlier ones — two different manuscripts stitched into one list.
• Are the hours depicted? Twelve named goddesses who guide the sun ought to be drawn somewhere, and no archived source describes their appearance.
• urt-hekau, Shenthit, Heqtit and most of the divisions' rosters are still absent from the census (C397). The hours themselves are too — only Nebt-usha was ever in it.

Art notes

• Historical plate: the Book of Gates hour-vignettes, if a scan can be found.
• New art: the twelve as a shift roster — a band of named figures, eleven armed and facing outward, the twelfth turned toward the light. Every element of that is in the names themselves and nothing needs inventing. This is the strongest unmade image in the corpus.