A young woman stands in front of a mirror, applying dark eyeliner.
She leans back to assess her work, pleased with the result. Before turning away, she picks up a gold bracelet. Gleaming in its center is an intricate decoration of a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns. She slips the bracelet up her forearm and smiles.
This scene is one that could take place anywhere today: putting on makeup and accessories in front of a mirror is a familiar ritual to many. But adornment and cosmetics have ancient roots. In ancient Egyptian and Nubian culture, they could also be part of a practice of goddess worship, specifically of Hathor. For her devotees, celebrating the beautiful and the sensual was all-important.
Who Was the Goddess Hathor?
Hathor was the ancient Egyptian deity of many realms: mother to Horus, god of the sky, and Ra, the sun god; and goddess of beauty (including cosmetics), sensuality, music, dancing, and maternity. She is often depicted wearing a headdress of cow horns with a sun disk between them, or as a cow or lioness. Worshipped across ancient Egypt and Nubia, from royal temples to domestic family altars, Hathor was one of the most important divinities in the ancient Egyptian and Nubian pantheons. “The worship of Hathor spread from Egypt to Nubia,” says Solange Ashby, a scholar of ancient Egyptian language and Nubian religion. “The oldest evidence of worship can be found in Egypt in the Old Kingdom, or the earliest period (around 2300 BCE).”
In the exhibition Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on view at the Getty Villa until April 3, 2023, many pieces of jewelry, such as this bracelet, feature the iconography of Hathor wearing the recognizable sun disk and cow horns.
Hathor’s worship spanned various classes in Egypt and Nubia. She was often associated with royalty; the Egyptian kings were sometimes depicted as suckling from the goddess, who was seen as the mother of the pharaohs, in both her human and cow forms. The Egyptian queen Tiye built a temple dedicated to Hathor in Nubia in the 14th century BCE, one of many dedicated to her. Ashby notes that because the Nubians were originally a pastoral people, they may have worshipped a cattle deity prior to Hathor. So, when the Egyptians conquered Nubia and brought their pantheon with them, Hathor and her connection to life-sustaining cattle appealed to the Nubians.
Hathor worship, according to Ashby, might seem like an “ancient Egyptian rave” to our modern eyes. She was honored through “singing, dancing, sexuality, childbirth, and drunkenness—physical or spiritual,” Ashby says, and the singing and dancing would often take place in temple ceremonies.
These rites, depicted on sanctuary walls such as the Temple of Philae on the Nubian/Egyptian border, would have included “lighting torches, men playing drums, and women playing double-headed flutes and rattles,” the most well-known instruments associated with the worship of the goddess. “The women would be singing and clapping; some young women can be seen dancing scantily clad doing backbends, adorned with jewelry,” Ashby says.
The ceremonies would be playful, sensual, and sometimes explicitly sexual. In one story, Hathor cheers up the glum Ra by showing him her vulva. This practice was taken up by her adherents as part of worship. This overt sexuality was not unusual within its cultural context, explains Ashby. “Ancient Egyptian religion and even their hieroglyphic writing system was full of explicit sexuality and depictions of sexual body parts,” she notes. A similar practice was present in the ancient Greek world as well; anasyrma, or the exposure of the genitals, occurred as part of religious rituals or humor.
Considering Hathor’s popularity across genders, states, and class divides, why isn’t she as well known as other Egyptian deities such as Isis (the sister-wife of the netherworld god Osiris)? One reason may be that Isis was exported to the Greco-Roman world in later periods, unlike the earlier Hathor. “Isis subsumed all the older goddesses within herself in the late period,” Ashby explains. “All of our information comes through Greeks and Romans around 300 BCE–300 CE [when they conquered Egypt].” Despite the Mediterranean's lack of knowledge about Hathor, she continued to be the most frequently represented divinity in Nubian jewelry during the period of Greek and Roman rule in Egypt.
Much of Isis’s iconography in these later Mediterranean cults, particularly the headdress and the sistrum rattle used in temple devotions, was based on Hathor, and arguably the worship of her lived on through that of Isis. This cameo with the bust of Isis in the Villa’s permanent collection galleries depicts her with Hathor’s headdress of the sun disk and cow horns.
Today, the worship of Hathor has all but vanished in modern-day Egypt and Sudan, which are Muslim-majority regions. But, Ashby notes that some contemporary African American communities have taken up Hathor worship and iconography, particularly the chanting and playing of the sacred rattle, as a reclamation of African spirituality in the diaspora. And considering how the art of adornment and cosmetics was part of goddess worship, perhaps the everyday rituals of making ourselves up can be traced back to the ancient celebration of Hathor too.
Watch Solange Ashby’s presentation on Hathor and ancient Nubian jewelry.
