Talk:Nephthys

Plutarch account on Nephthys' trickery of Osiris fathering Anubis.

The myth on how Nephthys tricked Osiris into fathering Anubis is a common theme. Can someone at least insert an information about this? With a reliable reference of course. Articles about Nephthys are indeed difficult to find, don't you guys think? Thank you. I am looking forward of seeing my favorite story (the Birth of Anubis) here. --110.55.177.219 (talk) 06:08, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Role

Perhaps I should have made Nephthys as the Goddess of the Night and Death? Please research and discuss. 110.55.183.34 (talk) 11:07, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Nephthys certainly had a connection with 'descent into darkness' (Pyramid Texts) and is associated with death (but so is Isis). Some see Isis and Nephthys as kind of polar aspects or reflections of each other. Apepch7 (talk) 16:07, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Editing article

I am trying to shorten and simplify the article because I found it very wordy and also had a number of subjective interpretations about Nephthys. I am not writing in new sections or text just doing an edit on the existing (mostly) and trying to cut out repetition. One thing generally I don't like about all the Egyptian deity articles is the bold alternative transliterations and I intend to put them into normal type. Apepch7 (talk) 12:11, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Response to "Role"

I think Nephthys is the goddess of night and death. I have very little justification, but if you've read Matthew Reilly's Six Sacred Stones, you would probably agree with me. (talk) 11:05, 04 April 2010

Pronunciation

isn't Greek or Egyptian; is unsourced; and seems entirely needless: everyone able to read the page will pronounce the name as Nefthis or Nebthis by default. Removed per WP:RS, WP:NOTADICTIONARY, and the parts of WP:LEAD that point out we shouldn't waste space with off-putting IPA where it's entirely useless. If "Nepthis" is a common and proper pronunciation (both dubious propositions: no one will pronounce it that way by default and a "proper" Grecian pronunciation would just use an aspirated T as well), that pronunciation would be worth keeping... but it probably still only deserves to go to Wiktionary. — LlywelynII 05:39, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Have any Egyptogists ever linked her to Neith?

Given my own theories on comparative mythology, I would like to see these two as different forms of the same goddess. But before I try making that argument I want to know if anything else has ever come to the same conclusion?--JaredMithrandir (talk) 01:19, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

JaredMithrandir: There may be some obscure instance where the two are syncretized, but I don't know of such an instance, and syncretism between two deities, as it says in the article section I just linked, does not mean that they are the same. If you're suggesting that they shared a common origin, I don't think anybody has suggested that, either. Neith was a Predynastic deity from the Delta who seems to have been the major goddess in the First Dynasty royal court. Isis and Osiris didn't appear until the Fifth Dynasty, and as far as I know the same is true of Nephthys. Most of the two goddesses' roles show no particular overlap with each other. The exception is the funerary sphere, where they were both invoked as protectors of the deceased, but Neith was rarely mentioned in the Pyramid Texts, suggesting that her funerary role only developed in the Middle and New Kingdoms. A. Parrot (talk) 01:59, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Common Origins is mainly what I'm thinking. Mainly because of how both are similar in different ways to Anath. I did not know Isis and Osiris showed up that late. That is a fascinating detail on the history of Egyptian Religion that needs to be talked about more.--JaredMithrandir (talk) 02:23, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

If those three are all that late then is Set/Seth also that late? Since they're a Tetrad of sorts? The name of Hor/Horus some to be attested among the names of Pre-Dynastic rulers.--JaredMithrandir (talk) 02:43, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

No, Seth and Horus both stretch into murky prehistory. The earliest certain depiction of Seth is on the Protodynastic Scorpion Macehead, and the serekhs from the reigns of Peribsen and Khasekhemwy in the Second Dynasty hint that the tradition of a rivalry between Horus and Seth may have existed or originated then.

J. Gwyn Griffiths pointed out long ago that there's no certain evidence of Isis and Osiris before the Fifth Dynasty. (There is some ambiguous evidence earlier than that, such as a relief from a shrine of Djoser that may depict the Ennead, which would imply that Isis and Osiris were around by then, but we can't be sure that's what it is.) Based on that and some inconsistencies in the Pyramid Texts' characterization of Osiris and Horus, Griffiths argued that the Horus–Seth rivalry was originally a separate tradition from the murder of Osiris and that the two were conjoined, producing the Osiris myth as we know it, sometime before the PT were written down. Egyptologists today generally seem to agree with this thesis, though it's hard to tell how widespread that acceptance is. Anyway, the impression I get is that during the Old Kingdom, Isis and Osiris emerged from obscurity and were tied in with kingship and the Horus–Seth conflict. By being connected with the king in the afterlife, Osiris became much more important, displacing deities like Anubis to become the premier god of the afterlife by the end of the Old Kingdom.

As for early evidence for Nephthys, all I know is that she's tied to the death and mourning of Osiris in the PT. In fact, the PT emphasizes Isis and Nephthys as a pair of mourners who help their brother to reach the afterlife, whereas in later texts Isis tends to hog the spotlight. A. Parrot (talk) 04:42, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks.--JaredMithrandir (talk) 04:58, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

In the case of all that, is it possible the Goat of Mendes being called the father of Horus The Child explains who Horus father was before the Osiris myths came along?--JaredMithrandir (talk) 03:52, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

It depends on what source you're getting that tradition from and how old it is, but I doubt it. Although references to Horus' childhood date back a long time (the late Old Kingdom, I think), Horus the Child was treated increasingly as a separate entity from the New Kingdom to the Ptolemaic Period. In Ptolemaic times, practically every temple to a male deity included a female consort and a male child. The consort was usually Isis or Hathor, and the child was usually Horus the Child or a form of him, but the father would be the local male deity. Without knowing what your source is, I would guess that it's one of those late genealogies that make Banebdjedet Horus' father, especially because Banebdjedet was closely linked with Osiris.

It's very difficult to guess what Egyptian mythology was like before the Pyramid Texts. I can give you my suspicions about it, but take them with a large pinch of salt (especially because I haven't studied the Pyramid Texts firsthand as much as I should, and there's probably a lot of evidence in them that I'm not aware of). I think it possible that the adult Horus who was worshipped in early dynastic times didn't have a mythological father. Early dynastic and Old Kingdom religion didn't emphasize family trees as much as Egyptian religion did in later times; it may not have seemed necessary to give each deity a firmly defined set of parents. The Osiris–Isis–Horus triad and the Ennead may well have been the first coherent mythological families in Egyptian religion, and my impression is that the notion of grouping gods into families spread outward from them. Note, for example, that many deities outside the Ennead who date back to early dynastic times, like Thoth and Anubis, are given wildly differing sets of parents in later sources, suggesting that their ancestry was invented ad hoc.

As for the adult Horus, the one sign of his pre-Osirian parentage is that, judging by various later references and the meaning of Hathor's name, Horus may have been the son of a celestial cow goddess—Hathor or Nut or Mehet-Weret, all of whom can function as bovine sky goddesses. That tradition may just be a symbol of his role as a sun god, the idea being that he was born from the womb of the night sky each morning. That concept is definitely attested for Ra in later times; see Eye of Ra#Procreative for some of the details. If Horus was the son of the celestial goddess, that would also fit with the hypothesis proposed by Hans Goedicke (in "Cult-Temple and 'State' During the Old Kingdom in Egypt" in State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, 1978) that Ra was originally a local form of Horus worshipped at Heliopolis, where his solar aspects were emphasized, and that Ra grew independent of Horus over time. But I'm rambling way off the topic of Nephthys and should really go to bed. A. Parrot (talk) 08:04, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

My source was right here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banebdjedet --JaredMithrandir (talk) 08:32, 18 January 2017 (UTC)