The Metternich Stele

Related: isis · horus · nephthys · serqet · thoth · set · ra · neb-un · heka · apesh · bennu

The object

Almost everything in this reference is a name in a list. This is a thing you could put your hand on.

It is cut in hieroglyphs upon a large stone stele which was made for Ankh-Psemthek, a prophet of Nebun, in the reign of Nectanebus I, who reigned from 373 B.C. to 360 B.C. The stele was dug up in 1828 at Alexandria, and was given to Prince Metternich by Muhammad Ali Pasha; it is now commonly known as the "Metternich Stele." [budge-1914]

A named owner. A thirteen-year window. A findspot and a date of discovery. That is firmer provenance than anything else this corpus handles, and it is worth stating plainly because the contrast is the point: the gods on this page are attested on an object, not in a list of names.

The man who paid for it, and the god he served, have their own problem — see neb-un, who survives only in the phrase "a prophet of Nebun" and is otherwise unknown.

What kind of text this is

A cippus — a plaque covered edge to edge in spells against snakebite and scorpion sting. These were practical objects. Water was poured over the inscribed surface and collected, and the water, having run across the spells, was drunk or applied.

So this is not literature that happens to be about healing. It is medical equipment, and the legend on it is there because reciting the story is how the cure works: what saved the infant Horus will save the person in front of you.

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Part one: the flight, and the Seven Scorpions

Isis is pregnant, hiding from Set, who has killed her husband. Thoth tells her to go:

Hide thyself with thy child, and these things shall happen unto him. His body shall grow and flourish… He shall sit upon his father's throne, he shall avenge him. [budge-1914]

She leaves at evening with an escort, and the escort is the strangest bodyguard in Egyptian literature.

There accompanied me Seven Scorpions, that were to travel with me, and sting with their stings on my behalf. [budge-1914]

All seven are named, and they travel in formation:

Their orders are to speak to nobody, ignore anyone who addresses them, and keep their gaze towards the ground so that they might show me the way.

The two women

They reach Teb, and the legend turns into something much sharper than a myth about gods.

A certain woman of quality spied me as I was journeying along the road, and she shut her door in my face, for she was afraid because of the Seven Scorpions. … As for me, a peasant woman called Taha opened her door, and I went into the house of this humble woman. [budge-1914]

The rich woman is Usert. The poor woman is Taha. Isis is taken in by the one with nothing.

Then the scorpions take their own counsel — they decide, not Isis — and pool their venom:

They took counsel concerning her, and they shot out their poison on the tail of Tefen. [budge-1914]

Seven doses loaded into one sting. Tefen crawls under Usert's door and stings her son. A fire breaks out in the house, and there is no water to put it out —

but the sky sent down rain, though it was not the time of rain. [budge-1914]

Usert runs through the town screaming for help and nobody comes out. She had shut her door; now every door is shut to her.

And then Isis heals him anyway

This is the moral turn, and the text does not labour it:

And I was sad for the child's sake, and I wished the innocent one to live again. [budge-1914]

She calls out to the mother — "Come to me! Come to me! There is life in my mouth" — and recites the spell that names each poison in turn and orders it to the ground:

O poison of Tefent, come forth, fall on the ground; go no further. O poison of Befent, come forth… I am Isis, the goddess, the mistress of words of power. I am a weaver of spells, I know how to utter words so that they take effect. … O poison of Mestet, go no further. O poison of Mestetef, rise not up in his body. O poison of Petet and Thetet, enter not his body. O poison of Maatet, fall on the ground. [budge-1914]

The child lives. The fire goes out. And Usert — who is not punished further, and not forgiven in words — loads gifts onto the peasant woman's house for a goddess she had not recognised.

The child shall live! The poison shall die! For Ra liveth and the poison dieth.

That last line is a formula, and the corpus has met it before

"For Ra liveth and the poison dieth."

Set it beside the password said at all four doors of heaven in Book of the Dead chapter CLXI: "Ra liveth, the Tortoise dieth" (see apesh).

Same shape, same first clause, different enemy. The god survives; the thing opposing him does not — a fill-in-the-blank formula with the hostile term swapped for whatever is being faced. This is the second member of a family, and the corpus should now be collecting them rather than treating each as a one-off.

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Part two: the death of Horus, and the sun stops

Isis hides the child in the papyrus swamp and goes out for food. She comes back:

I found him, Horus, the beautiful one of gold, the boy, the child, lifeless! He had bedewed the ground with the water of his eye and with the foam of his lips. His body was motionless, his heart did not beat, and his muscles were relaxed. [budge-1914]

A neighbour identifies the cause — "a scorpion hath stung him, the reptile Aunab hath wounded him" — and Isis, examining the wound and finding poison, takes him up:

She leaped about with him like a fish that is put upon hot coals. [budge-1914]

That is one of the most physical images in Egyptian writing, and it is describing a mother.

Nephthys arrives, and with her the scorpion-goddess Serqet — who is, precisely, the goddess of the sting. And Nephthys gives the advice that turns the story:

It is wholly impossible for the Boat of Ra to travel across the sky whilst Horus is lying dead. [budge-1914]

So Isis cries out to the Boat of Millions of Years.

And the Sun-god stopped the Boat. [budge-1914]

The sun stops in the sky because one child is dead. Not a king, not a god of the first rank — an infant hidden in a marsh. Thoth comes down out of the halted boat:

What is it, what is it, O Isis, thou goddess of spells, whose mouth hath skill to utter them with supreme effect? … I have come from the Boat of the Disk to heal Horus. [budge-1914]

Thoth's protection list

Thoth's argument is that Horus cannot die because of everything he already is — and the list is a compact catalogue of forms:

the Dweller in his disk · the firstborn son of heaven · the Great Dwarf · the Mighty Ram · the Great Hawk · the Holy Beetle · the Hidden Body · the Governor of the Other World · the Holy Benu Bird [budge-1914]

The Great Dwarf is the odd one and the interesting one — a protective dwarf-form among rams, hawks and beetles, in a healing text. Compare bes, whose whole business is protection at the domestic scale.

And then the reason the boat is still standing still:

The Boat of Ra standeth still and moveth not, and the Disk is in the place where it was yesterday, to heal Horus for his mother Isis. [budge-1914]

The cure is finished with a line that reads like a fee note — convey food of the town of Sekhem hither — and one that reads like a physician's triumph:

The poison is as the daughter of its own flame; it is destroyed because it smote the strong son. [budge-1914]

Horus revives. Thoth returns to the boat, which at once proceeds on its majestic course, and Isis asks that the child be raised by the goddesses of Pe-Tep — Buto, in the Delta — where he grows up, fights Set, and wins.

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Why this text matters to the rest of the corpus

It is a myth that exists to be used. Most of what this reference handles is funerary: spells for a dead person in a papyrus that was buried with them. This is a stone in a public place, about a living child, poured over with water for someone who has just been stung. The same gods, doing daytime work.

It gives Isis her actual character. Elsewhere she is a name in a roster or a gloss. Here she is frightened, escorted by scorpions, refused at a rich woman's door, taken in by a peasant, and then heals the child of the woman who refused her — while saying out loud that she is doing it even though the mother deserved it.

And it names eight beings the census does not carry — the seven scorpions and the reptile Aunab. They are as attested as anything in this corpus: named, in a dated text, on a surviving object.

Sources

• [budge-1914] — Budge, Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, "Legends of the Gods," pp. 88–92. Public domain, archived. Budge translates the legend nearly in full and summarises two short bridging passages; where he summarises rather than translates, this page says so.

Open threads

• The seven scorpions are not in the census. **Tefen, Befen, Mestet, Mestetef, Petet,

Thetet, Maatet — named, formationed, and individually addressed in a spell. They deserve a group page of their own**, and they are the best-attested unlisted set the corpus has found.

• Tefen or Tefent? The narrative spells him Tefen; the spell addresses Tefent and

Befent. A feminine ending appears the moment they are spoken to — which may be grammar, or may mean the spell addresses the poison rather than the animal.

• Aunab, the reptile blamed for the sting, is named once and nowhere else.
• Collect the "X liveth, Y dieth" formula. Two members now: the tortoise at the four doors

of heaven, the poison here. A third would establish the pattern properly.

• The Great Dwarf. Named in Thoth's protection list and not obviously any god in the census.

Test against bes and ptah.

• The goddesses of Pe-Tep (Buto) who raise Horus are unnamed here. **Compare the Souls of

Pe and Nekhen**, who have a page.

• Get a photograph of the stele. It is in the Metropolitan Museum, extensively published,

and the object itself is the best plate target in the corpus — the text on this page is physically on it.

• Usert and Taha are named human women in a mythological narrative, which is unusual.

Establish whether they are types or a local tradition.

Art notes

• Historical plate: the Metternich Stele itself. Photographed exhaustively; public-domain

images exist. The single strongest unclaimed plate target, and unusually it can be captioned as the actual source of the page rather than as an illustration of it.

• New art: the marching order. Two scorpions behind, one at each side, three ahead with

their eyes on the ground, and a woman walking in the middle. The formation is stated precisely in the text and has a diagram in it. Do not draw the stinging or the dead child; the legend's own emphasis is on the journey and the words.