The Hours of the Day and Night

The census lists these as two groups — "The Horus of the day deities" and "The Horus of the night deities" — with two completely different rosters of twelve.

Budge says they are the same twelve gods:

The deities of the hours of the night are the same as those of the hours of the day, and their names follow each other in the order in which they occur as gods of the hours of the day. [budge-1904]

One roster, running twice a day. This page covers both census groups.

The twelve

The first four hours are the Four Sons of Horus. The same gods who hold the canopic jars, the cardinal points and the limbs of the dead also hold the first four hours of every day and every night. See that page.

That is almost certainly why the census calls these groups "the Horus of the day deities" and "the Horus of the night deities" — the Horus is there because the list opens with his sons.

The rota

The best thing here is a table Budge prints on the next page: the gods who watch "before and behind Osiris-Serapis" through the twelve hours [budge-1904].

It is a shift rotation. Each god stands behind Osiris for one hour, then moves to before him for the next:

Read down the columns and it is one sequence, offset by one. Twelve gods walking a guard circuit around a body, each advancing a station every hour, for ever.

And it closes. Matchet is behind Osiris at hour 12 and before him at hour 1. The twelve hours are not a line that restarts; they are a ring, and Matchet is the join.

By night the inner column changes. The "behind Osiris" watch is the same twelve in the same order, but "before Osiris" is held by named great gods instead — Thoth and Anubis, Anubis and Wepwawet, Horus and Thoth, Horus and Isis, Isis and Nephthys, Shu and Geb, and so on [budge-1904]. The routine guard continues; the night shift gets senior officers in front.

Time and length are measured by the same gods

This is the finding that makes the group worth a page.

The Egyptians divided the royal cubit into twenty-eight finger-breadths and gave each one a god. Budge prints that list too [budge-1904] — and four of the twelve hour-gods are on it, consecutively, in their hour order:

Four gods, four consecutive fingers, four consecutive hours, same sequence.

So a unit of time and a unit of length are staffed by the same personnel. In this system measurement is not a neutral grid laid over the world — every graduation on the ruler and every division of the day is somebody. To measure is to invoke a list.

The cubit list also opens with Ra, Shu, Khent, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, Horus — the whole Ennead, in order, occupying the first ten fingers of a measuring stick.

What we do not have

Stated plainly, because it is most of the picture.

No iconography for any of the twelve. Budge gives names and positions. Nothing is described.

No source. He prints the tables without naming a manuscript. On internal grounds they are likely Late Period or Graeco-Roman temple material — the "Osiris-Serapis" form in the rota heading points that way — but the badge on these entries is an inference and is flagged as one.

Unstable names. Armai appears as Armai, Armaiu and Armaua in three lists within a few pages. The eleventh hour is Ari-nef Nebat in one table and An-erta-nef-nebat in the next, with Budge footnoting his own variant. The suggestion is that he transcribed several different tables without normalising them — which is worth knowing, because it means the variants may be genuine rather than errors.

Names that look like sentences. Ar-ren-f-tchesef reads as "he who made his own name," which in a religion where naming confers existence is a claim of self-creation. Maa-tef-f reads as "he sees his father." Neither is glossed by Budge and neither is asserted in the entries — but if these twelve are sentence-names rather than nouns, that is a real characteristic of the group and would repay a lexicon.

Sources

• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. II, ch. XIX "Miscellaneous Gods": §I the twenty-eight finger-breadths of the royal cubit (p. 291), §V the hours of the day (p. 294), §VI the hours of the night (p. 294), §VII the watch before and behind Osiris-Serapis (p. 295). Public domain, archived in sources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md), but these are transcribed tables rather than interpretation.
• [wilkinson-2003] — Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.

Open threads

• Find the manuscript. Budge cites none. Everything here is undated until one is

identified, and the group's whole character depends on whether it is Late Period temple material or something older.

• Reconcile with the census. The aggregate list gives two different twelve-name

rosters for day and night (Maat and Nenit, Hu and Ra em-nu, Nesbit and Agrit, Neb-t tehen, Sarit-neb-s…), and not one of those names appears in any archived source here. Either they come from a tradition Budge does not cover, or the census is reporting a different composition entirely. Worth resolving before this page is treated as settled — the two rosters may both be real.

• Establish whether the cubit-fingers 17–20 correspondence is a shared source list or

a genuine link between the divisions of time and length.

• Test the sentence-name parses with a lexicon.
• Settle the Armai and eleventh-hour spellings.
• Identify what "nebat" is in the eleventh-hour name.