The Seven Hathors

Also known as: "the Hathors" simply, in both archived tales Domains: fate pronounced at birth; the manner of death Members: none named. See below — the anonymity is a real feature, not a gap in the sources. Related: hathor · meskhenet · heqet · shai · renenutet · bata · isis · nephthys

Overview

At an Egyptian birth, seven goddesses arrive and say how the child will die.

They appear twice in the archived material, both times in New Kingdom tales, and both times they do the same thing: they turn up at the moment a life begins, speak once, and leave. Nothing is said about placating them and nothing is said about appeal.

What the texts say

The Doomed Prince. A childless king prays, and a son is granted:

Then came the Hathors to decree for him a destiny; they said, "His death is to be by the crocodile, or by the serpent, or by the dog." [petrie-1895b]

Note the form of it. Not one fate but three alternatives — and the rest of the tale is the boy's father trying to prevent all three by building him a house in the desert, which of course fails. The prince acquires a dog almost immediately, by asking for one.

Anpu and Bata. Khnum has just manufactured a wife for Bata at Ra's instruction, and "the essence of every god was in her":

The seven Hathors came to see her: they said with one mouth, "She will die a sharp death." [petrie-1895b]

"With one mouth" — they speak in unison, as a single verdict. And they pronounce on a being who is minutes old and made rather than born.

Why they have no names

This page has no roster, and that is not a failure of the sources.

Both tales call them simply "the Hathors." Neither individuates them, gives them separate speeches, or distinguishes their functions. They act as one voice, and the text says so explicitly in Bata's tale.

That makes them unlike every other group in this reference. The Ogdoad are four named pairs; the Four Sons of Horus each guard a different organ; the gate deities have individual names, doorkeepers and heralds. The Seven Hathors are a collective with no interior.

Inventing names for them would be inventing evidence. The page records seven speakers and one voice.

The handover — who assigns fate changed

The most interesting thing about them is not what they do but who they replaced.

Petrie notices it directly: "The Hathors here appear as the Fates, instead of the goddesses Isis, Nebhat, Mes-khent, and Hakt, of the old tale in the IVth Dynasty" [petrie-1895b] — that is, in the Westcar Papyrus, where four named goddesses attend a birth and act as midwives.

So the record shows a substitution:

All four of the earlier goddesses are full entries in this reference. The group that displaced them has, until now, had no page at all.

And the function shifts as the personnel does. The Westcar four are midwives who bring a child safely out and foretell that he will rule. The Hathors are assessors who state how he will die. Birth-help becomes death-sentence.

Whether that reflects a real change in Egyptian belief or only a change in literary fashion is not something two tales can settle — but the pair of them is a documented before-and-after, which is rare.

Why "Hathor" can be seven of anything

Petrie offers an explanation, and the archive supports it:

That Hathor should be a name given to seven deities is not strange when we see that Hathor was a generic name for a goddess… there was the Hathor of foreign lands, such as Punt or Sinai; there was the Hathor of home towns, as Dendera or Atfih; and Hathor was as widely known, and yet as local, as the Madonna. [petrie-1895b]

Checked against the archived sources, and it holds. Budge yields Hathor of Cusae, Hathor of Dendera, Hathor of Diospolis, Hathor of Aphroditopolis, Hathor of Nutenti [budge-1904] — and devotes a chapter not to Hathor but to "Hathor and the Hathor-Goddesses," treating the plural as a class.

If "Hathor" functions as a category rather than a personal name, then seven of them is not a puzzle at all. It is a quorum. See finding C199, and compare C151: Horus behaves the same way.

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

• [petrie-1895b] — Petrie (ed.), Egyptian Tales, Second Series: The Doomed Prince and Anpu and Bata, with Petrie's remarks. Public domain, archived. The only narrative source here.
• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians vol. I, ch. XIV "Hathor and the Hathor-Goddesses". Public domain, archived. Supplies the local Hathors.

Open threads

• Find the Seven Hathors outside these two tales. Temple lists, Dendera reliefs and coffin decoration are the places to look. Two literary attestations is thin for a group this well known.
• Establish whether they were ever named. The later tradition sometimes lists seven individual Hathors; nothing archived does. If a source names them, this page gains a roster and loses its most interesting feature.
• Test the handover. Is the four-to-seven shift visible outside Westcar and these two tales, or is it an artefact of which stories happen to survive?
• Determine whether they are connected to the seven-fold groupings elsewhere in Egyptian religion, or whether the number is incidental.
• Check whether the three alternative deaths in the Doomed Prince is a standard form. A fate given as a menu rather than a sentence is unusual.

Art notes

• Historical plate: none identified in the archived sources; Dendera has Hathor-headed capitals but nothing identified as the seven.
• New art: seven identical figures, deliberately identical — no distinguishing attributes, no individuation, speaking together. The whole point of them is that they have no interior. Any temptation to give them different faces should be resisted; that would illustrate a group the sources do not describe.