Racheli Shalomi-Hen

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

When studying divine classifiers (i.e. Gardiner's generic determinatives), one finds that throughout the private inscriptions of the Old Kingdom there is no special female divine classifier. Even in the Pyramid Texts, the largest corpus of religious texts from the Old Kingdom, in the rare cases where female deities are classified, the classifier is the falcon on the standard, that is, the very same classifier as male deities. Yet, when combing through the Middle-Kingdom's Coffin Texts and the later Book of the Dead, one finds that a female sub-category of the divine category is formed by a separate set of female divine classifiers. In this paper, I shall present and analyse the formation stages of the female-divine classifiers, as they are reflected from late Sixth Dynasty pyramids, First Intermediate Period texts and Coffin Texts.

The development of the female divine classifiers is related to the rise of Osiris as a prominent god from the latter half of the Fifth Dynasty. The seated bearded man,  (EG A40), the classifier used for the writing of Osiris' name from his first appearances on the private monuments of the Old Kingdom, is, in fact, a picture of Osiris. This picture became the principal divine classifier from the First Intermediate Period onwards. Unlike the falcon on the standard whose gender is not pronounced, the masculinity of the seated bearded man is conspicuous. The role of the seated bearded man as the principal divine classifier dictated the use of a female counterpart. The most suitable sign in terms of shape and gender was the seated woman  (EG B1), which indeed became the most common female divine classifier in the CT. This same woman appeared from the beginning of writing as a marker of the female-human class.

The need to distinguish between an ordinary woman and a goddess resulted in the application of various other classifiers to mark the female-divine category in the CT. Within these classifiers one finds the seated woman with cobra on her forehead . The cobra on the forehead may have been too fine a detail to provide the desired differentiation, and at the end of the process, the cobra / (EG I12/I13) without the woman became the most frequently used female-divine classifier in the BD.

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