Furthermore, as well as green plants, every moving thing would be their food with the exception that the blood was not to be eaten. Man's life blood would be required from the beasts and from man. A rainbow, called "my bow", was given as the sign of a covenant "between me and you and every living creature that [is] with you, for perpetual generations" 9: Noah died years after the flood, at the age of , [7] the last of the extremely long-lived antediluvian Patriarchs.
The maximum human lifespan, as depicted by the Bible, diminishes thereafter, from almost 1, years to the years of Moses. After the flood, the Bible says that Noah became a husbandman and he planted a vineyard. He drank wine made from this vineyard, and got drunk; and lay "uncovered" within his tent. Noah's son Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his brothers, which led to Ham's son Canaan being cursed by Noah.
Philo , a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, also excused Noah by noting that one can drink in two different manners: In Jewish tradition and rabbinic literature on Noah , rabbis blame Satan for the intoxicating properties of the wine. In the field of psychological biblical criticism , J. Rollins address the narrative of Genesis 9: Because of its brevity and textual inconsistencies, it has been suggested that this narrative is a "splinter from a more substantial tale".
The narrator relates two facts: Thus, these passages revolve around sexuality and the exposure of genitalia as compared with other Hebrew Bible texts, such as Habakkuk 2: Other commentaries mention that seeing someone's nakedness could mean having sex with that person as seen in Leviticus Genesis 10 sets forth the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, from whom the nations branched out over the earth after the flood.
These genealogies differ structurally from those set out in Genesis 5 and It has a segmented or treelike structure, going from one father to many offspring. It is strange that the table, which assumes that the population is distributed about the Earth, precedes the account of the Tower of Babel , which says that all the population is in one place before it is dispersed. Two of these, the Jahwist , composed in the 10th century BC, and the Priestly source , from the late 7th century BC, make up the chapters of Genesis which concern Noah.
The attempt by the 5th-century editor to accommodate two independent and sometimes conflicting sources accounts for the confusion over such matters as how many of each animal Noah took, and how long the flood lasted. Noah is the first vintner, while Adam is the first farmer; both have problems with their produce; both stories involve nakedness; and both involve a division between brothers leading to a curse. However, after the flood, the stories differ.
Noah plants the vineyard and utters the curse, not God, so "God is less involved". The Book of Jubilees refers to Noah and says that he was taught the arts of healing by an angel so that his children could overcome "the offspring of the Watchers ". There are 20 or so fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls that appear to refer to Noah. Indian and Greek flood-myths also exist, although there is little evidence that they were derived from the Mesopotamian flood-myth that underlies the biblical account.
The Noah story of the Pentateuch is almost identical to a flood story contained in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh , composed about BC. In the Gilgamesh version, the Mesopotamian gods are enraged by the noise that man has raised from the earth. To quiet them they decide to send a great flood to silence mankind. Various correlations between the stories of Noah and Gilgamesh the flood, the construction of the ark, the salvation of animals, and the release of birds following the flood have led to this story being seen as the inspiration for the story of Noah.
The few variations include the number of days of the deluge, the order of the birds, and the name of the mountain on which the ark rests. The flood story in Genesis 6—8 matches the Gilgamesh flood myth so closely that "few doubt that [it] derives from a Mesopotamian account. The earliest written flood myth is found in the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis and Epic of Gilgamesh texts. The people most likely to have fulfilled this role are the Hurrians , whose territory included the city of Haran , where the Patriarch Abraham had his roots. The Hurrians inherited the Flood story from Babylonia".
For the Mesopotamian antecedents, "the reigns of the antediluvian kings range from 18, to nearly 65, years. The discovery of artifacts associated with Aga and Enmebaragesi of Kish , two other kings named in the stories, has lent credibility to the historical existence of Gilgamesh. The "standard" Akkadian version included a long version of the flood story and was edited by Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between and BC. Noah has often been compared to Deucalion , the son of Prometheus and Pronoia in Greek mythology.
Like Noah, Deucalion is warned of the flood by Zeus and Poseidon ; he builds an ark and staffs it with creatures — and when he completes his voyage, gives thanks and takes advice from the gods on how to repopulate the Earth. Deucalion also sends a pigeon to find out about the situation of the world and the bird returns with an olive branch. The righteousness of Noah is the subject of much discussion among rabbis. In his generation of wicked people, he could be considered righteous, but in the generation of a tzadik like Abraham , he would not be considered so righteous. In his original scripts, Marston described scenes of bondage in careful, intimate detail with utmost precision.
For a story about Mars, the God of War, Marston gave Peter elaborate instructions for the panel in which Wonder Woman is taken prisoner:. Put a metal collar on WW with a chain running off from the panel, as though she were chained in the line of prisoners. Between these runs a short chain, about the length of a handcuff chain—this is what compels her to clasp her hands together.
At her ankles show a pair of arms and hands, coming from out of the panel, clasping about her ankles. Later in the story, Wonder Woman is locked in a cell. She holds her neck chain between her teeth. The chain runs taut between her teeth and the wall, where it is locked to a steel ring bolt. Marston shrugged it off. And never in psychology. Roubicek, who worked on Superman, too, had invented kryptonite.
She believed superheroes ought to have vulnerabilities. Gaines then sent Roubicek to Bellevue Hospital to interview Bender.
Bender believes that this strip should be left alone. Gaines was hugely relieved, at least until September , when a letter arrived from John D. Which is swell, I say. Marston was sure he knew what line not to cross. Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, he said.
In , Gaines and Marston signed an agreement for Wonder Woman to become a newspaper strip, syndicated by King Features. Busy with the newspaper strip, Marston hired an year-old student, Joye Hummel, to help him write comic-book scripts. Joye Hummel, now Joye Kelly, turned 90 this April; in June, she donated her collection of never-before-seen scripts and comic books to the Smithsonian Libraries.
Her stories were more innocent than his. Gaines had another kind of welcome to make, too.
Marston, Byrne and Holloway, and even Harry G. Peter, the artist who drew Wonder Woman, had all been powerfully influenced by the suffrage, feminism and birth control movements. And each of those movements had used chains as a centerpiece of its iconography. In , in Chicago, women representing the states where women had still not gained the right to vote marched in chains. More regularly, the art on that page was drawn by another staff artist, a woman named Lou Rogers.
But he was also determined to keep the influence of Sanger on Wonder Woman a secret. He took that secret to his grave when he died in Wertham believed that comics were corrupting American kids, and turning them into juvenile delinquents. He especially disliked Wonder Woman. They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent. At the Senate hearings, Bender testified, too. This argument fell on deaf ears. In the wake of the hearings, DC Comics removed Bender from its editorial advisory board, and the Comics Magazine Association of America adopted a new code.
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By New Kingdom times, the temple of Hathor of the Southern Sycomore, south of the city center, was her main temple in Memphis. A willow and a sycomore tree stood near the sanctuary and may have been worshipped as manifestations of the goddess. As the rulers of the Old Kingdom made an effort to develop towns in Upper and Middle Egypt , several cult centers of Hathor were founded across the region, at sites such as Cusae , Akhmim , and Naga ed-Der.
One of them continued to function, and to be periodically rebuilt, as late as the Ptolemaic Period, centuries after the village was abandoned. Dendera was Hathor's oldest temple in Upper Egypt, dating back at least to the Fourth Dynasty, [] and after the end of the Old Kingdom it surpassed her Memphite temples in importance.
The last version of the temple was built in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and is today one of the best-preserved Egyptian temples from that time. In the Old Kingdom, most priests of Hathor, including the highest ranks, were women. Many of these women, though not all, were members of the royal family. Thus, non-royal women disappeared from the high ranks of Hathor's priesthood, [] although women continued to serve as musicians and singers in temple cults across Egypt.
The most frequent temple rite for any deity was the daily offering ritual, in which the cult image, or statue, of a deity would be clothed and given food. Many of Hathor's annual festivals were celebrated with drinking and dancing that served a ritual purpose. Revelers at these festivals may have aimed to reach a state of religious ecstasy , which was otherwise rare or nonexistent in ancient Egyptian religion.
Carolyn Graves-Brown suggests that celebrants in Hathor's festivals aimed to reach an altered state of consciousness that would allow them to interact with the divine realm. An example is the Festival of Drunkenness, commemorating the return of the Eye of Ra, which was celebrated on the twentieth day of the month of Thout at temples to Hathor and to other Eye goddesses. It was celebrated as early as the Middle Kingdom, but it is best known from Ptolemaic and Roman times.
Whereas the rampages of the Eye of Ra brought death to humans, the Festival of Drunkenness celebrated life, abundance, and joy. In the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, celebrated at Thebes beginning in the Middle Kingdom, the cult image of Amun from the Temple of Karnak visited the temples in the Theban Necropolis while members of the local community went to the tombs of their deceased relatives to drink, eat, and celebrate. Several temples in Ptolemaic times, including that of Dendera, observed the Egyptian new year with a series of ceremonies in which images of the temple deity were supposed to be revitalized by contact with the sun god.
On the days leading up to the new year, Dendera's statue of Hathor was taken to the wabet , a specialized room in the temple, and placed under a ceiling decorated with images of the sky and sun. On the first day of the new year, the first day of the month of Thoth , the Hathor image was carried up to the roof to be bathed in genuine sunlight. The best-documented festival focused on Hathor is another Ptolemaic celebration, the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion.
It took place over fourteen days in the month of Epiphi. The endpoint of the journey was the Temple of Horus at Edfu , where the Hathor statue from Dendera met that of Horus of Edfu and the two were placed together.
Ancient Egyptian creation myths
The texts say the divine couple performed offering rites for these entombed gods. Martin Stadler challenges this view, arguing that it instead represented the rejuvenation of the buried creator gods. Bleeker thought the Beautiful Reunion was another celebration of the return of the Distant Goddess, citing allusions in the temple's festival texts to the myth of the solar eye.
She points out that the birth of Horus and Hathor's son Ihy was celebrated at Dendera nine months after the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, implying that Hathor's visit to Horus represented Ihy's conception. Egyptian kings as early as the Old Kingdom donated goods to the temple of Baalat Gebal in Byblos, using the syncretism of Baalat with Hathor to cement their close trading relationship with Byblos. A few artifacts from the early first millennium BC suggest that the Egyptians began equating Baalat with Isis at that time.
Egyptians in the Sinai built a few temples in the region. The largest was a complex dedicated primarily to Hathor as patroness of mining at Serabit el-Khadim , on the west side of the peninsula. It included a shrine to Hathor that was probably deserted during the off-season. The local Midianites , whom the Egyptians used as part of the mining workforce, may have given offerings to Hathor as their overseers did. After the Egyptians abandoned the site in the Twentieth Dynasty , however, the Midianites converted the shrine to a tent shrine devoted to their own deities.
In contrast, the Nubians in the south fully incorporated Hathor into their religion. During the New Kingdom, when most of Nubia was under Egyptian control, pharaohs dedicated several temples in Nubia to Hathor, such as those at Faras and Mirgissa.
Therefore, Hathor, Isis, Mut, and Nut were all seen as the mythological mother of each Kushite king and equated with his female relatives, such as the kandake , the Kushite queen or queen mother , who had prominent roles in Kushite religion. Thus, in the Meroitic period of Nubian history c. In addition to formal rituals inside temples, individual Egyptians worshipped deities for personal reasons, including in their homes. Birth was hazardous for both mother and child in ancient Egypt, yet children were much desired.
Thus fertility and safe childbirth are among the most prominent concerns in Egyptian popular religion, and fertility deities such as Hathor and Taweret were commonly worshipped in household shrines. Egyptian women squatted on bricks while giving birth, and the only known surviving birth brick from ancient Egypt is decorated with an image of a woman holding her child flanked by images of Hathor.
Hathor was one of a handful of deities, including Amun, Ptah, and Thoth, who were commonly prayed to for help with personal problems. Most offerings to Hathor were used for their symbolism, not for their intrinsic value. Cloths painted with images of Hathor were common, as were plaques and figurines depicting her animal forms.
Different types of offerings may have symbolized different goals on the part of the donor, but their meaning is usually unknown. Images of Hathor alluded to her mythical roles, like depictions of the maternal cow in the marsh. Some Egyptians also left written prayers to Hathor, inscribed on stelae or written as graffiti. In contrast, prayers to Hathor mention only the benefits she could grant, such as abundant food during life and a well-provisioned burial after death.
As an afterlife deity, Hathor appeared frequently in funerary texts and art. In the early New Kingdom, for instance, Osiris, Anubis, and Hathor were the three deities most commonly found in royal tomb decoration. Reliefs in Old Kingdom tombs show men and women performing a ritual called "shaking the papyrus". The significance of this rite is not known, but inscriptions sometimes say it was performed "for Hathor", and shaking papyrus stalks produces a rustling sound that may have been likened to the rattling of a sistrum.
In the Third Intermediate Period, Hathor began to be placed on the floor of the coffin, with Nut on the interior of the lid. Tomb art from the Eighteenth Dynasty often shows people drinking, dancing, and playing music, as well as holding menat necklaces and sistra—all imagery that alluded to Hathor.
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These images may represent private feasts that were celebrated in front of tombs to commemorate the people buried there, or they may show gatherings at temple festivals such as the Beautiful Feast of the Valley. Thus, texts from tombs often expressed a wish that the deceased would be able to participate in festivals, primarily those dedicated to Osiris. Drinking and dancing at these feasts may have been meant to intoxicate the celebrants, as at the Festival of Drunkenness, allowing them to commune with the spirits of the deceased.
Hathor was said to supply offerings to deceased people as early as the Old Kingdom. Several spells in the Coffin Texts from the Middle Kingdom were written to allow deceased people, including both men and women, to join Hathor's retinue in the afterlife. Beginning in the Third Intermediate Period, Hathor's name was prefixed to the names of deceased women in texts on burial equipment and funerary monuments. Some burial goods that portray the deceased like goddesses may refer to this same belief, although whether the imagery refers to Hathor or Isis is not known.
The link between Hathor and deceased women was maintained into the Roman Period, the last stage of ancient Egyptian religion before its extinction. Media related to Hathor at Wikimedia Commons. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Hathor disambiguation. Sistrum handle bearing the face of Hathor with a curling wig, 16th to 14th century BC. Amulet of Hathor as a uraeus wearing a naos headdress, early to mid-first millennium BC. Menat necklace, 14th century BC. Assmann, Jan []. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Translated by David Lorton.
Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. The Many Faces of the Goddess: Darnell, John Coleman In Redford, Donald B. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Ancient Egyptian creation myths - Wikipedia
Fischer, Henry George In Fisher, Marjorie M. African Kingdoms on the Nile. The American University in Cairo Press. Frandsen, Paul John Their Function, Decline and Disappearance". Goedicke, Hans October Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Women in Ancient Egypt. In Draycott, Catherine M. In Friedman, Renee; Adams, Barbara.
The Followers of Horus: Studies Dedicated to Michael Allen Hoffman. Hollis, Susan Tower Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections. Jebel Barkal History and Archaeology.