#akhonography

Lay Bare The Heart “True intentions lie not in the head but in the heart.” -- Bontu, god of ambition

For the reference to the Egyptian belief that the heart is the seat of all thought.

Electrify “Some hid from the storm. I embraced it and learned its name.”

In Egyptian belief, words were what created the land, and names gave it countenance. A name is, in essence, a magic uttering. To know a (true) name, be it that of a demon or a deity, is to be able to exert a certain power over it.

Throne Of The God-Pharaoh "When the Second Sun rests between the horns on the horizon, so begins the Hour of Revelation. Then the Hour of Glory, the Hour of Promise, and finally the Hour of Eternity." -- The Accounting of Hours

I have not heard of the epithet “The Red Wind” as being used for Seth. I think this may be a case of this fictionalised source contracting into one moniker one of his physical aspects (being red-haired/red-eyed) or his position as Lord of the Red Land (the desert), and his association with wind, clouds and storms.

Seth’s most well-known epithet is “Son of Nut”. So much so that it was almost the equivalent of his name. He also answers to “Great of Strength”, “The One of Nubet”, and the more general “Great God”. In the Book of the Dead he is referred to as “Lord of the Northern Sky” in his connection with storm and thunder. The epithet “Powerful of Forefoot” was his in Ombos and Sepermeru.

We refer to her as simply Cleopatra, but her full name was Cleopatra VII Philopator, called the Great. 

It is not unequivocally clear whether or not she committed ritual suicide after her and Mark Antony’s defeat at Actium by having an asp or cobra bite her. She may also have poisoned herself.

The idea that she was obsessed by poison, as “evidenced” by the anecdotes of her demonstrating to Mark Antony that she could easily poison him, should be taken with a grain of salt. To my knowledge, there is no evidence for this beyond those second-hand accounts, certain paintings (looking at you, Alexandre Cabanel) notwithstanding. She did murder her brother and co-regent Ptolemy XIV by poison, and her sister Arsinoe IV did not survive her ambitions either. (But, honestly, poisoning your brother/sister/mother/father because they got in your way was a bit of a Ptolemaeic family tradition.)

Neither was Cleopatra the exquisite beauty pop culture paints her. The coins bearing her likeness seem to point in a different direction, though it’s still obviously in the eye of the beholder whether or not she was beautiful. Among her contemporaries, especially her Egyptian subjects, she was renowned for her intelligence and political acumen, not her beauty. She was also a woman who fiercely fought for her country’s independence, defying the continuously expanding Rome, even if she at the same time fought for her and Mark Antony’s ambitions of expanding their own territory. Cleopatra remained a role model amongst her erstwhile subjects for hundreds of years after her death. 

*Beware: essay coming up

Please keep in mind that when I’m reasoning my way through the Amonkhetu names and their possible Egyptian meaning/influence, I have to reason back from the written word and perceived pronunciation only. This is difficult for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being the lack of hieroglyphs and specifically, determinatives, to guide me. There will sometimes literally be tens or hundreds of options for a single consonantal grouping, and all I can do is look at the meagre context of Amonkhetu society to figure out what the best option would be. 

Then also keep in mind that this is all just for good fun, and is unlikely to accurately reflect the writers’ ideas about what these names mean or what their provenance is (if they even thought about that to the extent I’m about to). 

I’ve already mentioned that Samut was an Egyptian word meaning “combustion”, “burning” or “incineration”, and on Twitter I’ve talked a bit about Djeru and Tah, which I’d like to take as “kite” and “to kill” respectively. Now, the new names we’re presented with in Brazen:

Neit is likely to have been based off the goddes Neith - ny.t in classical Egyptian. “The Terrifying One”, Neith was a primeval goddess, protectress of the king. She is often depicted with arrows and a shield. 

Dedi is an attested Egyptian personal name. While I can’t find a meaning for that attested name, there is the word “dd”, meaning “garden”. Dedi could be a nisbe of the same, dd.y, meaning “he of the garden”, or a possessive construction, dd=i, meaning “my garden”.

Setha may be a play on Seth. It’s the most obvious explanation and therefore probably the correct one. However, I’d actually like to take it as st-hA, meaning “seat of jubilation”. Also because:

Basetha can then be taken as ba-st-hA, “respected seat of jubilation”. This theory, I feel, reflects the twin-nature of the names and the characters better. 

Kamat has a very elegant option in kA-m-A.t, “life force through strength”, which seems to fit her character rather well. 

Meris, taken as mri=s, is an attested Egyptian personal name as well, meaning as much as “she loves”. This would be great, if Meris wasn’t a boy. The difficulty with names ending in -t or -s is that more often than not they’re of the female gender. Since there’s no viable alternative unless I go into really obscure grammatical constructions, I’ll leave it at this for Meris.

Imi is similarly difficult, because the one hieroglyphic equivalent I’d like to see it as, im.y, is a masculine nisbe meaning “who is in”. This was often used in the title of Overseer, im.y-rA. 

Hepthys is the odd one out. This is very clearly based on Greek spellings of Egyptian names, with Nephthys being the first one to spring to mind. Unfortunately, that makes it rather impossible for me to reason back beyond saying “probably a reference to Nephthys” (though unlikely to be a pure reference, since Hepthys is male also).

Tausret, finally, is also a historically attested name, and not just any name at that. Queen Tausret, or Tawosret, meaning “The mighty one” (feminine), was the wife of Pharaoh Seti II. After his death, she became regent to his young heir Siptah. When Siptah died after a 6 year reign, she took the throne and ruled Egypt as the last (known) Pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty. 

No need to apologise, “lukewarm” is in fact an accurate description of my feelings on the aven/naga/minotaurs. Though I must say that the minotaurs are the biggest culprit in this, followed by the naga, for the simple fact that they are races described with terms from different cultures. Aven is a term native to Magic (I believe?), and therefore less of an issue for me. 

So I have little trouble with the aven and only in terms of nomenclature with the naga. My issue with the minotaurs, however, is divided in three parts:

Semantics: Minotauros means Bull of Minos. The minotaurs of Amonkhet have ram’s heads, which is an effort to make them fit in I recognise and appreciate, but at the same time also makes it feel all the more off to me.

Cultural: They’re Greek things. Greek. Ew.

Cultural, part 2: Going a bit deeper into Egyptian iconography, by and large the ram was a solar (god) symbol. Having the minotaurs in red and black thus doesn’t do it for me flavour-wise. 

Personally, I like the Amonkhetu ammit, but those aren’t depicted (part) anthropomorphically, so I don’t think they count as a self-aware species like humans etc. I would’ve liked to see a race perhaps inspired by the Bennu bird, however difficult it may be to differentiate these from the aven. Though at the same time that is exactly what would have made it so eminently suited for Amonkhet. Not only were there a great many deities depicted with bird’s heads, there are no less than 265 attested bird hieroglyphs. Egypt was drowning in birds, is what I’m saying. 

In fact, I would’ve been perfectly content had Amonkhet been populated with different bird-races only. The bird had a great many symbolical hats in ancient Egypt, from the realm of the gods to being an integral part of voice offerings to the bird-catching scenes that represented the containment of chaos/evil. 

The Egyptians themselves didn’t call it the Book of the Dead. They called it pr.t m hrw (peret em heru) - or “Going Forth by Day”. It was a collection of spells that helped the deceased attain their most precious afterlife; the culmination of a text corpus that has its first attested appearance in the Old Kingdom, the Pyramid Texts. These texts evolved through the millennia. In the Middle Kingdom, the Book of Two Ways and the Coffin Texts were the primary guides to the afterlife, and more importantly: they became available to the wider public, not just the king as was the case for the Pyramid texts. The Coffin Texts eventually gave birth to the Book of the Dead.

Because Miriam Lichtheim puts it more succinctly than I currently have the energy for, below I’ll share a quote from Volume II of her outstanding series, Ancient Egyptian Literature.

The Book of the Dead, or, “the coming forth by day”, as the Egyptians called it, was a large compilation of spells designed to bring about the resurrection of the dead person and his safety in the afterlife. (...) It is evident that the Book of the Dead is a book of magic. In all periods of ancient Egyptian culture magic was considered a legitimate tool; and in the confrontation with death and the magical approach attained its most luxuriant growth. That is to say, magical means were not felt to be inimical to piety. (...)

No other nation of the ancient world made so determined an effort to vanquish death and win eternal life. Individual thinkers might increasingly lose faith in the promise of eternal life, and might adopt attitudes of resignation and even skepticism. But the majority appear to have clung to the hope of a bodily afterlife and to a reliance on magic as the means to achieve it. Eternal life had come to be conceived in the most grandiose terms: the dead were to become godlike and join the company of the gods. (1976, p. 119)

Now, the pr.t m hrw isn’t the only ancient Egyptian funerary text in existence. (In fact, it isn’t even one text: no single Book of the Dead contains all 192 attested spells.) It is by far the most well-known funerary text, however. As mentioned in this ask, also over on @vorthosjay’s blog, the dwʕt (duat), or underworld, was divided into twelve hours. The Amduat, “What Is In the Netherworld”, is a funerary text that details these twelve hours, the dangers they represented, and how to traverse these regions of the underworld.

The Amduat, then, was a sort of roadmap to the afterlife, like the Book of Two Ways before it. Like the Pyramid Texts the Amduat was at first only for the benefit of Pharaohs and a very few nobles; in the 21st Dynasty, the use of this text became more widespread. 

J. H. Taylor wrote a short but sweet paper on the Amduat of Panebmontu, which you can read in its entirety online. (I highly recommend doing so; it’s great.)

From that paper:

The Amduat narrates the story of the sun’s nocturnal journey beneath the earth, from its setting below the western horizon in the evening to its re-emergence at dawn in the east. There are twelve divisions, each corresponding to one hour of the night. During his passage it was believed that the sun god and his entourage of deities fought and overcame the forces of chaos (embodied chiefly as the giant serpent Apep), and experienced rejuvenation, enabling him to be re-born the next morning. By placing the text and images of the Amduat on the walls of the king’s tomb, it was believed that the dead ruler was identified with the sun god and would himself share in the rejuvenation which the deity experienced. (2016, p. 138)

I do think that while the Book of the Dead may have been the initial starting point for the Amonkhet equivalent because it’s so integral a part of the public’s perception of Egyptian culture, creative would have quickly picked up on the Amduat and used that as their further point of reference. 

Because we all know Amonkhet is waiting for the second sun to “rise” and Bolas to be “reborn”.

The final juicy tidbit: Throne of the God-Pharaoh mentions four final hours. The  Amduat papyri from the 21st Dynasty onward often only contain the final four hours of the night. 

It doesn’t wash completely, though, because there’s specific mention in (I can’t remember which) Magic Story of a relief that depicts eight animal-headed gods.

So the human-headed god seems to be out, unless, like actual Egyptian religion, that god had multiple forms (which I doubt, considering Magic’s necessarily linear worldbuilding). A ram-headed god I consider a definite possibility, if not a given. Perhaps there was a falcon-headed god to cover the falcon-like Aven on Amonkhet - and considering the amount of birds in the Amonkhet art I wouldn’t even consider it odd for them to have two bird-headed gods. 

I think the general consensus (Bastet, Thoth, Anubis, Sobek, Wadjet) after they were first spoiled was pretty much on the money, especially as far as appearance goes. 

Now, characterisation is a bit trickier. In fact, the more I read about them, the more I am convinced that only a small part of their Amonkhetu character is - loosely - tied to their Egyptian counterparts. I already talked about Hazoret as her own entity and not necessarily a one-on-one copy of Anubis, and I think this goes for all the gods.