𓅃 Ḥr

The Cult

Ḥr's cult outlasted every rival theology of the ancient world. The oldest centre was Nekhen, Hierakonpolis, where excavations exposed a Predynastic temple court to the falcon. In the Ptolemaic temple of Edfu, built 237 to 57 BCE and the best-preserved in Egypt, colleges of wab-priests and lectors enacted the daily awakening of the god, washing, clothing, and feeding the cult image in the sanctuary's seclusion.

The calendar's high feast was the Beautiful Reunion (heb nefer): Hathor of Dendera journeyed to Edfu, and their union, celebrated on the temple roof, renewed the kingship each year. Outside the temple, Horus healed: Horus-cippi, stelae showing the god standing on crocodiles and gripping snakes, stood at thresholds and in houses, and water poured over the inscribed spells was drunk as medicine, the rite behind the great Metternich Stela (Metropolitan Museum of Art). When the last temple on Philae closed under Justinian, around 537 CE, the falcon's liturgy had run, with interruptions and revivals, for some three millennia, a continuity nothing else in this catalogue approaches.

The Image

The falcon was his first portrait, and it never stopped being made. Already in the late Predynastic age the Hierakonpolis colossus, a monumental limestone bird now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, shows the god as pure bird.

The Old Kingdom added tenderness: on Khafre's diorite statue (Egyptian Museum, Cairo, c. 2500 BCE) the Horus falcon spreads its wings behind the king's head, sheltering the royal body with its own. Thereafter the composite form dominates, the falcon-headed man wearing the double crown of the united Two Lands, or the solar disk as Horakhty, his enemies pinned beneath his feet. Temple avenues bristled with falcon statuary, a colossal granite example of which stands in the Louvre, and from the Late Period the Horus-cippus made the protective image a household object, mass-produced in stone for doorposts and walls.

Afterlives

Europe met Ḥr late, and the meeting changed both sides. The bridge was Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride (c. 100 CE), which carried the Osiris-Horus cycle into Greek; for eighteen centuries it was the only continuous narrative of the myth the West possessed.

Early-modern Europe read the falcon through fantasy: Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–1654) drowned genuine signs in confident invention. Champollion's decipherment (Lettre à M. Dacier, 1822; Grammaire, 1836–1841) returned the falcon to history: every royal titulary opens with a Horus-name, so Egyptology itself begins, literally, with Horus.

Napoleon's savants published the temples in the Description de l'Égypte (1809–1829); Edfu's relief program, the largest surviving corpus of Egyptian temple texts, is today being translated in full by Dieter Kurth's Edfu project (1998– ). The wedjat's sixty-three sixty-fourths meanwhile found a second career among historians of mathematics, Richard Gillings' Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs (1972) giving the fraction series its modern readership. And Gardiner's sign-list made the falcon on its perch the first portrait every student of the language learns.