Hathor

Hathor is one of the oldest and most many-sided of Egyptian goddesses, and the breadth of her domains, love, beauty, music, dance, drunkenness, motherhood, fertility, reflects a deity worshipped by nearly everyone for millennia. She is shown as a cow, or as a woman with cow's horns cradling the sun-disc, and titled the Golden One and the Lady of Turquoise. Her festivals were joyous and sometimes deliberately drunken: at the Festival of Drunkenness worshippers drank to excess in order to reach the goddess, re-enacting a myth in which humanity was saved from destruction by beer. She presided over the mining regions of Sinai, where at Serabit el-Khadim Egyptians and Semitic-speaking workers alike left inscriptions to her.

Hathor's most distinctive architectural legacy is the Hathor-headed column, a capital carved with her face, cow ears and a small temple-facade crown, used across Egyptian temple architecture for well over a thousand years and still visible in its most complete form lining the hypostyle hall of her temple at Dendera. The type appears as early as the Middle Kingdom and became so closely tied to her that the columns themselves, whatever temple they stood in, functioned as a standing invocation of Hathor's protective presence, one of the clearest cases in Egyptian art of an architectural form doubling as a permanent image of a specific goddess.

Hathor's gentleness had a fierce counterpart. As the Eye of Ra, the sun-god's active, protective power sent out against his enemies, she could turn into the lioness Sekhmet, and the myth of the Destruction of Mankind tells how she nearly annihilated humanity in that form until she was tricked into drinking beer dyed red like blood and so pacified. This doubleness, the loving goddess who is also the raging eye, is characteristic of Egyptian thinking about divine power. In the funerary sphere Hathor was Lady of the West, who received the setting sun and welcomed the dead into the afterlife, so that a dead woman might herself become a Hathor. The Greeks identified her readily with Aphrodite, and her temple at Dendera, though largely of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, preserves one of the most complete pictures of any Egyptian cult.

The ceiling of a chapel within Hathor's Dendera temple once carried the so-called Dendera Zodiac, a sandstone relief planisphere combining Egyptian and Greek astronomical symbolism from the Ptolemaic period, the only complete map of the ancient sky to survive from Egypt. In 1821 a French engineer, working under authorisation obtained through complex and disputed circumstances, removed the entire ceiling block by force using saws and gunpowder and shipped it to Paris, where it remains displayed in the Louvre; the empty ceiling space at Dendera today, with only a plaster cast of the original in its place, is one of the more visible physical scars left on Egyptian religious architecture by nineteenth-century European antiquities collecting.