About the character of deification of the Egyptian Queens of the New Kingdom

Abstract

The article analyzes the character of deification of Queens of the New Kingdom on the basis of their official representation in Egyptian pictorial and textual evidence. In order to reveal the nature of the deification of Queens and the essence of their theological role as a whole, the article discusses specific methods and features of assimilation of Queens with the goddesses. (first of all, goddesses Hathor, Isis, Maat, Mut, Nekhbet) or goddess of the solar-Eye (Hathor/Tefnut). By “deification” the author means endowing a Queen with the features of a goddess, and two aspects of this phenomenon are distinguished: the deification of living and dead Queens. The focus of the present study is only the deification of living Queens. The author puts the trend to assimilate them with goddesses in close relationship with the evolution of the ideology of royal power and the so-called “solarization” of the image of the ruling king, which reached its maximal expression under Amenhotep III and Ramses II (the period of Akhenaten’s reign which deserves a special study was deliberately omitted). The bulk of the evidence for this trend is provided by pictorial sources, and in particular, the individual iconography of Queens. The study of the selection of sources allows drawing a fundamental conclusion that there were undoubtedly various semantic parallels between the Queens and the principal goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon. Nevertheless, the assimilation of Queens with the goddesses, with some exceptions, did not reach a level of complete identification with the latter, and these parallels themselves were drawn mainly means of iconography, and not laudatory phraseology.