136 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniathe destruction of mankind by Ra, she appears as the eye of
the sun-god who plies her work at night; and a text at Dendera
speaks of her as“resting on her throne in the place for beholding
the sun's disc, when the bright one unites with the bright one.”In
any case she is closely connected with the rising sun, whose first
rays surround her head.
Egyptian tradition maintained that she had come from the land
of Punt, from those shores of Arabia and the opposite African
coast from which the Pharaonic immigrants had made their way
to the valley of the Nile. She was, moreover, the goddess of the
Semitic nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula; in other words, she
was here identified with the Ashtoreth or Istar of the Semitic
world.^122 Now the name of Hathor does not seem to be Egyptian.
It is written with the help of a sort of rebus, so common in
[147] ideographic forms of writing. The pronunciation of the name is
given by means of ideographs, the significations of which have
nothing in common with it, though the sounds of the words they
express approximate to its pronunciation. The name of Hathor,
accordingly, is denoted by writing the hawk of Horus inside the
picture of a“house,”the name of which was Hât. A similar
method of representing names is frequent in the ideographic
script of ancient Babylonia; thus the name of Asari, the Egyptian
Osiris, is expressed by placing the picture of an eye (shi) inside
that of a place (eri).
The name of Hathor, therefore, had primitively nothing to do
with either Horus or the house of Horus, whatever may have been
the speculations which the priests of a later day founded upon
the written form of the name. It was only an attempt, similar to
those common in the early script of Babylonia, to represent the
pronunciation of a name which had no meaning in the Egyptian
language. But it is a name which we meet with in the ancient
inscriptions of Southern Arabia. There it appears as the name of
(^122) Horus and Hathor, that is to say, Baal and Ashtoreth, were, according to the
Egyptians, the deities of Mafket, the Sinaitic Peninsula.