{"it":{"id":"TX018","kind":"text","sub":"Egyptian","name":"Book of the Heavenly Cow","place":"Cairo","date":"New Kingdom (earliest in Tutankhamun's shrine, c.1325 BCE)","oldest":"c.1325 BCE","inst":"Outer gilded shrine of Tutankhamun, Egyptian Museum Cairo; tombs of Seti I, Ramesses…","lang":"Middle/Late Egyptian","src":[216],"lat":30.048,"lon":31.234,"tags":["Egypt","Egypt","Sky beings"],"sum":"The Book of the Heavenly Cow tells of a time when Ra lived on Earth and ruled people directly, until humans plotted and he left for the sky.","why":"An Egyptian myth explains why the sun god left the earth, and how humanity nearly ended before he went.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":1,"yt":"Read Hornung's translation.","rel":["TX021","TX022"],"hook":"To save humanity, Ra had 7,000 vessels of blood-red beer poured over the fields to make a goddess drunk."},"S":{"216":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Heavenly_Cow"]},"rec":{"id":"TX018","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA121","a":"Memory of gods who once lived on Earth then left (matches 'stopped interacting').","who":"AA writers generally","main":"Etiology of why gods are distant: divine kingship ended.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Heavenly_Cow","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Heavenly Cow, section 1","q":"Ra grows old; humans plot; Hathor-Sekhmet slaughters; Ra withdraws to sky. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"Hornung 1982","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Heavenly_Cow","mo":"gods depart"}],"tr":[{"by":"E. Hornung","yr":"1982","t":"Der ägyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh","lic":"copyright","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Heavenly_Cow"}],"mo":[{"v":"withdrawal_of_gods","ev":"P019","n":"Egyptian","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Heavenly_Cow"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Etiology of why gods are distant: divine kingship ended.","alternative_reading":"Memory of gods who once lived on Earth then left (matches 'stopped interacting').","alt_proponent":"AA writers generally","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Direct motif match to Big Ski's thesis; mainstream reads as myth of separation.","key_theme":"Ra rules on earth, humans rebel, Sekhmet slaughters them, Ra withdraws to sky on Nut as cow","language":"Middle/Late Egyptian","physical_object_institution":"Outer gilded shrine of Tutankhamun, Egyptian Museum Cairo; tombs of Seti I, Ramesses II, III, VI","composition_date":"New Kingdom (earliest in Tutankhamun's shrine, c.1325 BCE)","oldest_ms_date":"c.1325 BCE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0443","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Heavenly_Cow"},{"id":"VTX018-2","t":"Budge, Legends of the Gods (1912), Project Gutenberg text","u":"https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9411/pg9411.txt"},{"id":"VTX018-3","t":"Mouseia: The Book of the Heavenly Cow, translation (PDF)","u":"https://mouseia.org/downloads/heavenly-cow/heavenly-cow-musean.pdf"}],"sum":"# The Book of the Heavenly Cow: The Day the Sun God Left the Earth\n\nDeep in the tomb of Seti I, in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, a doorway off a hall of columns leads into a small side room. On the wall facing the door a great cow is painted in red. Her belly is marked with a row of thirteen stars, and beneath it sail two boats, the boats of the sun. Each of her four legs is steadied by a pair of gods, and under her body stands the god Shu, arms raised, holding her up. Around her, on all four walls, runs a long text in hieroglyphs. It tells how the gods once lived among people, why they left, and how humanity was almost wiped out before they went.\n\nEgyptologists call it the Book of the Heavenly Cow. It is one of the strangest documents of ancient Egypt, and one of the few that tries to explain why the world is no longer the way it was at the beginning.\n\n## Where the text is found\n\nThe earliest copy known was found on the outermost of the gilded shrines that enclosed the coffin of Tutankhamun, around 1325 BCE. That copy is incomplete. Three complete versions were carved in the tombs of Seti I, Ramesses II and Ramesses III, each in a side room off the burial chamber built specially for this one book. Ramesses VI, lacking such a room, had an excerpt carved in a niche, and another excerpt survives on a papyrus of the Ramesside period now in Turin. The book runs to about 330 verses, and the picture of the cow divides it roughly in half.\n\nSo in the New Kingdom this was royal material, reserved for the tombs of pharaohs. Its language is Middle Egyptian, which suggests to some scholars that it was composed earlier, perhaps in the Middle Kingdom; touches of later Egyptian in its grammar have led others to place it in the Amarna period, around Akhenaten's religious upheaval. Édouard Naville first published and translated the version from Seti I's tomb in the 1870s, and E. A. Wallis Budge retold it in English in 1912 in his Legends of the Gods. Modern translations by Alexandre Piankoff and Erik Hornung followed.\n\n## A king grown old\n\nThe story opens in a time when the gods, in Budge's words, \"went about in the country, and mingled with men.\" The king of Egypt was Ra, the sun god himself, ruling on earth. And Ra had grown old. His subjects complained that \"his bones have become like silver, and his members have turned into gold and his hair is like unto real lapis-lazuli.\" They began to plot against him.\n\nRa did not strike at once. He summoned the gods who had been with him in the primeval waters to a secret council in the Great House, and he asked their advice, unwilling, the text says, to slay the rebels without hearing what his gods had to say. They told him to send out his Eye, against which no eye on earth could stand, in the form of the goddess Hathor. The rebels fled into the mountains. The Eye pursued them and destroyed them. Hathor rejoiced in the work, and through the night she waded in the blood of men.\n\n## The rescue by trickery\n\nThen Ra changed his mind. He ordered messengers to \"run like the wind\" south to Elephantine, at the First Cataract of the Nile, and bring back a substance called tataat. Budge, following Brugsch, guessed it was a fruit, perhaps mandrakes; modern translators read it as red ochre. It was ground up and mixed into a great brewing of beer, and the beer turned the colour of blood. In all, the text says, they made seven thousand vessels of it.\n\nBy night the beer was poured out over the fields. When Hathor came she saw what looked like a flood of blood, drank it, became drunk, and \"paid no further attention to men and women.\" Humanity was saved not by a command but by a ruse, and Ra decreed that ever after his festivals should be celebrated with vessels of beer.\n\n## The departure\n\nYet the rescue did not end the estrangement. Ra said his limbs were weak \"for the first time\" and that he was weary of the children of men. So the god Nu told Shu to help him, and ordered Nut, the sky, to take Ra on her back. \"Nut changed herself into a cow, and with the help of Shu Ra got on her back.\" When people saw that he was leaving, they were filled with fear and repentance and begged him to stay. But the cow moved on, and darkness covered the land.\n\nWhat follows is a new order of the world. Ra ascends into heaven and creates a place there to which the dead may come, the Field of Peace and the Field of Reeds. He makes the stars, which the text compares to flowers. When Nut trembles under the height, he sets up supports to hold the sky, with Shu and the eight Heh gods beneath her. He sets Geb, the earth god, to watch over the serpents, and makes Thoth his deputy, with power over the moon and the night sky. The abdication, as Budge put it, was complete.\n\n## How scholars read it\n\nThe mainstream reading, set out most fully by Erik Hornung, treats the book as a myth of separation. Once, gods and humans lived together under a divine king. Human rebellion brought punishment, and with it suffering and death came into the world, along with a break in the original unity of creation. The creator withdrew to the sky, and the world became the divided place people knew, with gods above, humans below, and the dead somewhere between. Scholars also read it as a theodicy, an explanation for why a good creator allows suffering, and as a magical text meant to help the king follow Ra into the sky. Some see in its theme of a near destruction of humankind a parallel to the flood stories of Mesopotamia and the Bible.\n\nReaders drawn to the idea of ancient contact see something else in it: a memory of gods who once lived on earth, governed people directly, and then stopped. The question is open, and no measurement could settle it. But the shape of the story is striking all the same. The gods do not simply exist in the sky from the beginning. They arrive in the sky later, after a crisis, carried there, leaving behind rules, rites, protective words and appointed deputies to manage what they left. Egypt is not alone in remembering an age when the gods walked the earth and then withdrew.\n\nThe book's last pages tell the reader how to use it. A man who recites it rightly, washed in Nile water, dressed in new linen and white sandals, with an image of Maat, truth, painted on his tongue in green, shall have life in the other world.\n\nPicture the scene it describes at its turning point: a darkened land, crowds of frightened people crying out to stay their king, and above them a vast cow rising into the night, the old sun god on her back, the stars just beginning to bloom across her belly like flowers.","qs":["Why tell a rescue as the story of a departure?","Ra ruled on Earth, then left for the sky after humans rebelled. Why do so many cultures remember gods who left?","Why would a god's mercy come by trickery rather than command?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Nut1.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nut1.JPG","title":"Nut1.JPG","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"The image was scanned and uploaded by w:en:User:King Vegita.","cap":"Nut, Noet"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Champollion_-_Panth%C3%A9on_%C3%A9gyptien%2C_1823_%28page_311_crop%29.jpg/1280px-Champollion_-_Panth%C3%A9on_%C3%A9gyptien%2C_1823_%28page_311_crop%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Champollion_-_Panth%C3%A9on_%C3%A9gyptien,_1823_(page_311_crop).jpg","title":"Champollion - Panthéon égyptien, 1823 (page 311 crop).jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Léon-Jean-Joseph Dubois","cap":"Illustration de File:Champollion - Panthéon égyptien, 1823.djvu"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c. 1325 BCE","h":"New Kingdom (earliest in Tutankhamun's shrine, c.1325 BCE)","s":[292]},{"v":"c.1325 BCE","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[292]},{"v":"Middle/Late Egyptian","h":"Language","s":[292]}],"hs":{"292":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Heavenly_Cow"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX018.webp","w":774,"h":537,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Nut1.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}