Mehit

Not to be confused withMenhit.

Mehit
Relief depicting Mehit, dated to the reign ofPtolemy IIand now atWalters Art Museum.
Major cult center	Nekhen Thinis
Genealogy
Spouse	Anhur

Mehit inhieroglyphs

Mehit(alsoMehyt) was anancient EgyptianandNubianlion goddess of Nubian origin.

History

In theEarly Dynastic periodshe was depicted as a reclining lioness with three bent poles projecting from her back. In that era she appears in numerous early dynastic sealings and ivory artifacts, usually together with a representation of anUpper Egyptianshrine.Her main places of worship wereHierakonpolisandThinis.

Beliefs

Mehit was the consort ofAnhur,or Onuris, a hunter god who was worshipped in Thinis. Various texts allude to amythin which Anhur tracks down Mehit inNubiaand brings her to Egypt as his wife. This event is the basis for Anhur's name, which means "bringer-back of the distant one". Late sources identify this story with the "Distant Goddess" myth, in which theEye of Ra—a solar deity who can take the form of several goddesses—runs away from her fatherRa,who sends one of the gods to retrieve her. In the version with Anhur and Mehit, Anhur is syncretized withShuand Mehit withHathor-Tefnut,Shu's mythological sister and wife. Because Shu and Tefnut sometimes represented the sun and moon, Mehit could also represent the full moon. Her return to her proper place could thus represent the restoration of theEye of Horus,a symbol of the moon and of the divine order of the cosmos.

Geraldine Pinchsuggests that the Distant Goddess may have originally been a personification of the wild deserts of Nubia, whose myth was absorbed into a complex of myths surrounding the Eye of Ra.Toby Wilkinsonsays that in Early Dynastic times she may have been a protector goddess, associated with holy places.