We often talk about Ancient Egypt as though it was one simple, static thing, unchanging until, maybe, the Ptolemies arrived on the scene. But “Ancient Egypt” covers some three thousand years, and while some things may have been broadly true all through those millennia, myths and religious stories changed, were consciously edited and adapted to fit the circumstances of the time, or the intentions of the writer. There was no internally consistent, static whole that myths and beliefs added up to, no one official “right” version of any story.
So given that this is a body of (often fragmentary) myths from a huge range of time, which was always changing to fit the needs of the moment, why stay in the past? Why not move far, far into the future? And the story of the goddess Sekhmet’s destruction of mankind is so intriguing. Some older translations of the text suggest that mankind rebels against Re because he’s become old, but more recent translations don’t offer any reason at all for it. And the goddess sent to put the rebellion down is the nurturing, healing Hathor, who manifests as Sekhmet, the Powerful, the Lady of Slaughter. Who even Re himself can’t stop, once she’s let loose. She’s so dangerous you’d think the gods would be glad to be rid of her, but in other stories Sekhmet, seemingly always angry, leaves Egypt and has to be searched for and cajoled to come back. Those plentiful ambiguities and elisions are irresistible to me.
ANN LECKIE