Egyptian Gods
Ancient Egyptian Gods, Goddesses and Religion
Mythology of Sothis
The goddess who personified the bright, first magnitude star
Sirius (the 'dog star') was called Sopdet by the ancient
Egyptians and Sothis by the Greeks. Her husband was Sah, god of
the neighboring constellation Orion, and her son Soped or
Sopdu, another astral deity. The importance of Sirius for the
ancient Egyptians lay in the fact that the star's annual
appearance on the eastern horizon at dawn heralded the
approximate beginning of the Nile's annual inundation which
marked the beginning of the agricultural year. Thus the goddess
was called 'bringer of the New Year and the Nile flood' and
became associated at an early date with Osiris who symbolized
this annual resurgence of the Nile and who was also personified
in the night sky by the neighboring constellation Orion. Even
as early as the Pyramid Texts Sothis was described as having
united with the king/Osiris to give birth to the morning star,
Venus, and through her association with the netherworld god she
was naturally identified with Isis - eventually appearing at
times as the combined goddess Isis-Sothis. Iconography of Sothis
Although the earliest known representation of Sothis -
found on a 1st-Dynasty ivory tablet of Djer from Abydos -
depicts the goddess as a reclining cow with a plant-like
emblem (perhaps representing the 'year') between her horns,
she is almost invariably represented as a woman wearing a
tall crown not unlike the White Crown of Upper Egypt but
with tall, upswept horns at the sides and surmounted with a
five-pointed star. In this form Sothis had few iconographic
attributes and is usually depicted as simply standing with
arms at her sides or with one arm folded across her lower
breast. On occasion the goddess could also be represented
as a large dog, however, and in her form of Isis-Sothis she
is also shown riding side-saddle on this sybolic animal on
some of the coins minted at Alexandria in Roman times.
Worship of Sothis
The star Sirius may have been worshipped as a cow-goddess
in predynastic times, but eventually became identified with
Isis and with Sothis. While Sothis was clearly a goddess of
some importance in her own right, her increasing
identification with Isis led to a lessening of her
individual identity in later times. In the Old Kingdom she
was important as a deity of the inundation and as an
afterlife guide to the deceased king, yet by the Middle
Kingdom she is identified as a 'mother' and 'nurse', and
during the Graeco-Roman Period her assimilation with Isis
was almost complete.
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