The Ninth Division

Source section: the Ninth Division of the Tuat, called Best-aru-ankhet-kheperu, in the Book of Am-Tuat Preceded by: the Eighth Division — the loom hour proper Related: the Tenth Division · the Sixth Division · the Fifth Division · the Fourth Division · the Seventh Division · the Second Division · the First Division · the Twelfth Division · the Third Division · osiris · ra · horus · the Twelve Hours · the Gate Deities

Overview

The ninth hour of the sun's night journey contains three companies of twelve, stacked one above the other:

• Upper register — twelve gods, each seated on a weaving loom, swathed in

linen.

• Middle register — twelve goddesses whose entire function is speech.
• Lower register — twelve cobras, each mounted on a weaving loom,

breathing fire.

All three rosters are complete and named. Most of the names are not on the 497-name census and enter this reference for the first time, recovered from a source archived since early in the project.

Corrected 2026-07-30 — this page originally described two registers

The first version of this page had the goddesses and the uraei and treated the looms as an unexplained oddity in the lower register. Reading the division out properly found a third company above them, and the looms are not an oddity at all — they run through the whole hour. See C232.

The twelve gods, on their looms

1. Nehata · 2. Teba · 3. Maati (or Ariti) · 4. Menkhet · 5. Hebs · 6. Nebti · 7. Asti-neter · 8. Asti-paut · 9. Hetemet-khu · 10. Neb-Pat · 11. Temtu · 12. Mena [budge-1905]

Budge introduces them as "Twelve gods, each of whom is seated upon the symbol of linen swathings," and the text confirms it twice over:

Those who are in this picture in the Tuat are seated firmly on their instruments for weaving, and they are in the form of the figures which Horus made. Ra saith to them: — O ye who are swathed in your holy swathings, who are arrayed in your garments, whom Horus covered up when he hid his father in the Tuat… uncover ye your heads, O ye gods, unveil ye your faces, and perform ye the things which must be done for Osiris! [budge-1905]

They are wrapped, and they are asked to unwrap. Ra's instruction is to uncover their heads and unveil their faces — which means the default state of these gods is bandaged, and the sun's arrival is what unwraps them.

Budge adds that they are "the tchatcha (i.e., divine sovereign chiefs) of this god, and they avenge by their words Osiris each day" [budge-1905].

The twelve goddesses

1. Perit · 2. Shematkhu · 3. Nebt-shat · 4. Nebt-shefsheft · 5. Aataatet · 6. Nebt-setau · 7. Hent-nuts · 8. Nebt-mat · 9. Tesert-ant · 10. Aat-khu · 11. Sekhet-metu · 12. Netert-en-khentet-Ra [budge-1905]

The text describing them:

Those who are in this picture with their bodies of the Tuat are they who are in the forms which Horus made. This great god crieth out to them after he hath arrived at the place where they are, and they come to life and they hear [his] voice. Their work in the Tuat is to raise the praises of Osiris, and to embrace the hidden Soul by means of their words, and to bring life and strength to the risings of the god of the Tuat… and they utter words on [his behalf] in the chamber each day. [budge-1905]

They are inert until spoken to. Ra arrives, calls out, and only then do they "come to life and hear his voice." Between his visits they are not asleep — the text implies something closer to not yet switched on. Twelve beings whose existence is intermittent and begins each night when a voice reaches them.

Their work is entirely verbal. They praise, they "embrace the hidden Soul by means of their words," they "utter words on his behalf in the chamber each day." No weapons, no gates, no hauling. Compare the gate deities, who guard, or the hours, which are stages: this company's contribution to getting the sun through the night is saying things.

That fits the corpus's broader finding about Egyptian magic — that it is executive rather than miraculous (heka, C121, C200). Here an entire company exists to supply the utterance.

"In the forms which Horus made." The same phrase is used of the gods in the register above — so it is a formula of this division rather than a remark about these goddesses. Both companies are described as things Horus made.

The corpus has one other manufactured divine figure — bata's wife, framed by Khnum at Ra's order with "the essence of every god" in her — and the vocabulary of divine beings being fabricated now recurs across two unrelated texts (C230).

The twelve uraei

In the lower register, a second company:

Twelve uraei, which are mounted each on its instrument for weaving, and each pours forth fire from its mouth [budge-1905]

Named, as far as the OCR preserves them: Tekait, Khut-Tuat, Tert-neshen, Apshet, Ankhet, Shenten-amm, Aataru, Nebt-uauau, Nebt-Rekeh [budge-1905]. Three of the twelve are lost in the scan; see open threads.

Cobras on looms, spitting fire. Still the strangest single image here — but no longer unexplained, because the looms are not confined to this register.

What the whole division is about

Set the three companies side by side and one thing runs through all of them:

Two of the three companies are seated on looms, and the upper twelve are explicitly bandaged. Swathings is the ordinary word for mummy wrappings.

So the ninth hour appears to be the wrapping hour — the stage of the night journey concerned with linen: the looms that make it, the bandages that result, and the gods whom Horus "covered up when he hid his father in the Tuat."

That last clause is the tell. Horus hid Osiris by wrapping him, and these gods were covered up in the same operation. The register is not decorated with looms; it is about them.

Tested 2026-07-30 — the reading is right and the hour is wrong

This was offered as a reading and then tested by counting linen vocabulary across all twelve divisions. It does not centre on the ninth.

term	Eighth	Ninth	elsewhere
weaving	14	2	—
linen	5	1	—
swathing	3	2	Second 1, Tenth 1
bandage	3	—	Fourth 1, Sixth 4, Tenth 1

The Eighth Division is the loom hour. Called Tebat-neteru-s, "the Chests of the Gods," it is built of Circles, each entered through a named door, and in Circle after Circle the occupants are "seated upon an instrument for weaving." Not obscure Tuat beings either — Circle Sesheta holds Tem in the White Crown, Khepera and Shu; Circle Tuat holds Tefnut, Seb and Nut. Six of the largest gods in Egypt, on looms [budge-1905].

And the reward formula states the payoff: "Whosoever knoweth them by their names shall be the possessor of swathings upon earth" [budge-1905]. Learn the Eighth Division's names and you are guaranteed a proper wrapping.

So this hour is a continuation, not the centre. The reading stands; the attribution was wrong, and is corrected here rather than quietly moved. See C236.

The pattern within this division is still real — three companies, two on looms, one explicitly swathed, in the hour whose central act is the concealment of Osiris. It is the tail of something that begins an hour earlier.

Budge notes the line above the uraei is mutilated, restored conjecturally by Maspero [budge-1905], so a fuller statement may be exactly what is lost.

Worth following up: tayt, the goddess of linen and weaving, is a bare ○ name-only entry in this corpus with no attested function. An entire hour of the Tuat organised around linen is the context she has been missing.

Why this page exists

Ten of the twelve goddesses were not in the census: only perit and sekhet-metu were carried, both as unresearched stubs. The other ten — Shematkhu, Nebt-shat, Nebt-shefsheft, Aataatet, Nebt-setau, Hent-nuts, Nebt-mat, Tesert-ant, Aat-khu, Netert-en-khentet-Ra — appear in this reference for the first time.

They were found only because the common-word tier was finally read rather than scored: perit sat there as an unresearched name, and reading her context produced a complete roster of twelve (C225). The names were in an archived file the whole time.

Why there are no individual entries for these twelve

Decided 2026-07-30 and written into the loop spec as the companies rule: a roster member gets its own entry only if the sources say something about it that is not true of its company.

These twelve are named and nothing else. The text gives one description for all of them, one address from Ra, one collective function. A name plus a position in a list is not differentiation.

Contrast the Assessors of Maat, where each of the forty-two has a different sin and a different locality, or the Gate deities, where each gate has its own named doorkeeper, watcher and herald. Those rosters are lists of individuals. This one is a single company with twelve labels.

The names are recorded above, in full, and are searchable. What they do not get is twelve pages each saying "one of twelve; nothing further known." See C246.

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Sources

• [budge-1905] — Budge, The Book of Am-Tuat, vol. I, Ninth Division (Best-aru-ankhet-kheperu), pp. ~198–201. Public domain, archived.

Open threads

• Recover the three missing uraeus names — attempted 2026-07-30 and failed. A second independent scan of Budge's Am-Tuat (budge-1906-alt) has the same three gaps in the same places (positions 1, 3 and 9). Two scans failing identically suggests the loss is in the printed original or the plate, not the scanning — so this may not be recoverable from Budge at all, and would need a different edition of the Am-Tuat entirely.
• ~~Recover the three missing uraeus names (original note)~~ The OCR loses positions 2, 7 and 9 of the lower register.
• ~~Check the twelve gods against the census~~ — done 2026-07-30: 3 of 12 carried (ariti, nebti, neb-pat, all unresearched stubs). Ten are new — Nehata, Teba, Maati, Menkhet, Hebs, Asti-neter, Asti-paut, Hetemet-khu, Temtu, Mena — exactly matching the ten new goddesses (C227). Twenty of this division's twenty-four named gods and goddesses were absent from the census. Another edition or a cleaner scan would complete the roster.
• ~~Explain the looms~~ — partly closed 2026-07-30: they are not confined to the uraei. Two of three registers sit on looms and the upper twelve are explicitly swathed; see the reading above.
• ~~Test the wrapping reading against the other eleven divisions~~ — done 2026-07-30, and it relocated the theme to the Eighth (C236).
• Write the Eighth Division (Tebat-neteru-s) as its own page. The loom hour: Circles behind named doors, major gods on weaving instruments, souls crying to Ra in voices "like [the hum] of many bees of honey," and swathings promised to whoever learns the names. Richer than this page, and unwritten.
• Connect tayt. She is the linen goddess and currently a bare name-only entry; this division is the richest linen context in the archive and nothing links them yet.
• "In the forms which Horus made" — establish whether this is a standard formula in the Am-Tuat or specific to this division.
• Determine whether the goddesses' intermittent existence — coming to life when Ra calls — is peculiar to them or general to Tuat beings.
• Give each of the twelve goddesses an individual entry with a **Group:** field, on the Gate deities pattern, once it is clear whether the sources say anything about them individually. They may not — a company that acts with one voice may be like the Seven Hathors, where the collective is the unit.

Art notes

• Historical plate: the Ninth Division register drawings in Budge's Am-Tuat vol. I.
• New art: the lower register. Twelve cobras, each upright on a loom, fire from each mouth. Nothing else in the corpus looks like it, and the strangeness should not be tidied — the domesticity of the loom against the venom of the uraeus is the whole image.

The name of the hour

Every division of the Am-Tuat is closed — or opened — with a three-part formula: the name of the gate, the name of the city, and the name of the hour of the night. The hours are goddesses, and they are named.

For the Ninth Division the source gives:

Shares the -maket(et)-neb-s ending with the Second, which is the only repeated element across the seven.

All twelve hours are named — see the Names of the Hours. The Am-Tuat gives the formula in only seven of its divisions, which led this reference to conclude twice that the rest did not exist (C400, then C414). They are all in the Book of Gates summary, listed consecutively (C417). A bounded negative should trigger a wider search, not a narrower footnote.