Talk:Menhit

Mehit and Menhit

Now that there are articles on both of these goddesses, I'm trying to sort out the confusion between them. Looking at their respective entries in Richard Wilkinson's Complete Gods and Goddesses and the entry on Onuris in Geraldine Pinch's Egyptian Mythology, I've concluded that the claim that Menhit was the consort of Onuris is the result of confusion with Mehit. It's possible that Menhit was also linked with Onuris, considering the fluidity of divine relationships and the close overlap between these goddesses' roles, but as far as I know, that is not the case. Nor do the sources say that Menhit was the Eye of Ra, though I suspect she sometimes was. Most goddesses took on that role in some context, lioness goddesses seem to have done so universally, and Wilkinson says Menhit could act as the uraeus, which was the other major animal form of the Eye.

With Mehit given the role in the Onuris myth, it's now Menhit whose character seems comparatively nebulous. I'll add what little it says in Wilkinson. A better understanding of Menhit is probably to be found in the German-language sources listed in the Menhit article.

Considering how much difficulty I've had keeping these goddesses straight, I'd like to suggest a mnemonic:

MENHIT = Not Onuris' wife

in case that helps anybody. A. Parrot (talk) 00:58, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

The Egyptian religion spans about 4000 years; during that time deities went out and then back into fashion, mutated, often beyond recognition, merged and split; new myths were invented and old ones forgotten or transformed. Considering that, I find the minute differences between Mehit and Menhit are not sufficient to claim they were different deities. They were both from Nubia, and had similar portfolios; they are represented by identical images (observe the illustrations for both articles, for instance); their names are probably just regional or temporal variants in pronunciation (considering how drastically a language can evolve over millennial timespans, this is a very tame variation), and so are the differences in hieroglyphic representation. Claiming these goddesses are different because of the "n" would be like insisting that Ἀπόλλων (Attic spelling of Apollo) must be a different god than Ἀπέλλων (Doric spelling), because one has an "o" and the other an "e".

Yes, one myth calls Mehit a consort of Anhur, a southern war god; another myth from another time and place calls Menhit, a southern war goddess, a consort of Khnum. But if this different marital attribution were enough to call them different goddesses, then half the Egyptian pantheon, or Greek for that matter, would need to be likewise reduplicated. To give just one instance, the Aphrodite born from Ouranos' seed and sea foam (acc. Hesiod, Apuleius) would need to be considered a completely different goddess than the Aphrodite born of Dione by Zeus (acc. Homer, Euripides), not to mention other variants. But nobody, now or in antiquity, would seriously entertain the notion of these being two different goddesses.

It is also telling that English egyptological sources mention primarily Mehit, and Menhit only as a variant; while the German sources talk of Menhit, and do not mention Mehit. Now ain't that curious?

And finally, there is old Occam and his razor. . . --Freederick (talk) 12:56, 18 September 2021 (UTC)