{
  "id": "hathor",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Hathor",
  "summary": "\"The Eye of Ra\" — the goddess Ra sends to slaughter rebellious mankind, who wades in blood as Hathor-Sekhmet until beer dyed red makes her merry and she forgets to kill; also \"lady of the turquoise\" of Sinai and one of the Seven Hathors who decree fate. The Greek witnesses know only her name in Plutarch's \"Athyri\", which he gives to Isis.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "egyptian",
    "deities",
    "goddesses",
    "festival",
    "fate"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ra"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sekhmet"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "isis"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "horus"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "nut"
    },
    {
      "rel": "discussed_in",
      "target": "egyptian-gods-list"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who is Hathor?",
    "What is the Eye of Ra?",
    "Why did Hathor stop killing mankind?",
    "Is Hathor the same as Sekhmet?",
    "Who are the Seven Hathors?",
    "Is Hathor a cow goddess?",
    "Does Plutarch mention Hathor?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "In the Destruction of Mankind Ra summons \"his Eye (i.e. the goddess Hathor)\" with the other gods; Nu advises \"Let thine Eye (Hathor) attack those who blaspheme thee\", the gods add \"no eye can resist thine when it goeth forth in the form of Hathor\", and \"the Eye of Ra, or Hathor, went in pursuit of the blasphemers in the mountains, and slew them all\", saying that \"the work of vanquishing men was dear to her heart\" (Budge Lit. ch. VII).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.92
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "\"For three nights the goddess Hathor-Sekhmet waded about in the blood of men\"; Ra had mandrakes crushed into beer with the blood of the slain, seven thousand vessels poured on the meadows, and when Hathor drank \"she became very merry, and, the sleepy stage of drunkenness coming on her, she forgot all about men, and slew no more. At every festival of Hathor ever after 'sleepy beer' was made\" (Budge Lit. ch. VII).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.92
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Rameses III sends inspectors \"to the turquoise desert (i.e. Sinai) of my mother, the goddess Hathor, the lady of the turquoise\", laying silver, gold and linen before her (Budge Lit. ch. VIII); in the Tale of the Two Brothers, when Khnemu fashions a wife for Bata, \"the Seven Hathor Goddesses came to her, and they said, 'She shall die by the sword'\" (Budge Lit. ch. XI).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The Pyramid Texts of Unas hail the dead king as her child: \"Behold Horus, the son of Osiris! Behold Unas, the firstborn son of Hathor! Behold the seed of Keb!\" (Budge Lit. ch. II).",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.88
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Plutarch never writes Hathor, but gives her name to Isis: Isis \"is sometimes called Muth, and again Athyri or Methyer\", where Athyri means \"the mundane house of Horus, the place and receptacle of generation\" (Plut. Is. 56); Athyr is also his name of the month in which Osiris vanished (Plut. Is. 13; 39; 69). Athyri is the Greek form of Hathor, so Plutarch's witness is that in his day Hathor's name was treated as a title of Isis.",
      "sources": [
        "plutarch-isis-osiris"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The cow, usually given to Hathor, belongs in these witnesses to other goddesses: Nut \"took the form of a cow\" to carry Ra to heaven (Budge Lit. ch. VII), Herodotus's Isis is \"horned like a cow\" (Hdt. 2.41.2), and the \"gilded image of a cow\" shrouded in black at the Athyr mourning is Isis, \"inasmuch as they regard both the cow and the earth as the image of Isis\" (Plut. Is. 39). No passage here attaches the cow to Hathor by name.",
      "sources": [
        "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians",
        "herodotus-histories",
        "plutarch-isis-osiris"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [
    "One text, two names: the slaughtering goddess is 'Hathor' and 'Hathor-Sekhmet' in the same legend, which is the oldest witness for their identity.",
    "The \"sleepy beer\" of her festival is explained by the myth itself — an aetiology inside the tomb of Seti I.",
    "Her Greek trace is a name transferred to Isis (Athyri) and a month (Athyr); the cow imagery in these witnesses belongs to Isis and Nut."
  ],
  "faqs": [
    {
      "q": "What is the Eye of Ra?",
      "claim": "c1"
    },
    {
      "q": "Why did Hathor stop killing mankind?",
      "claim": "c2"
    },
    {
      "q": "Is Hathor the same as Sekhmet?",
      "claim": "c2"
    },
    {
      "q": "Who are the Seven Hathors?",
      "claim": "c3"
    },
    {
      "q": "Does Plutarch mention Hathor?",
      "claim": "c5"
    },
    {
      "q": "Is Hathor a cow goddess?",
      "claim": "c6"
    }
  ],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "theoretical",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Encyclopaedias open with \"cow goddess of love and music\". This object reports what the texts read here actually attach to her name — the Eye of Ra, the blood and beer, turquoise, the Seven Hathors — and says plainly which familiar attributes are not attested in these witnesses.",
  "confidence": 0.87,
  "last_verified": "2026-09-03",
  "media": [],
  "x": {
    "myth": {
      "pantheon": "egyptian",
      "kind": "deity",
      "group": "other",
      "domains": [
        "the Eye of Ra",
        "drunkenness and festival",
        "turquoise",
        "fate"
      ],
      "symbols": [
        "beer",
        "turquoise",
        "cow"
      ],
      "wikidata": "Q133343"
    }
  },
  "canonical_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/hathor",
  "api_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/api/k/hathor.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Hathor",
    "description": "\"The Eye of Ra\" — the goddess Ra sends to slaughter rebellious mankind, who wades in blood as Hathor-Sekhmet until beer dyed red makes her merry and she forgets to kill; also \"lady of the turquoise\" of Sinai and one of the Seven Hathors who decree fate. The Greek witnesses know only her name in Plutarch's \"Athyri\", which he gives to Isis.",
    "url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/hathor",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-09-03",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Herodotus, Histories — tr. A. D. Godley (Loeb, 1920), Perseus TEI edition",
        "url": "https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/blob/master/data/tlg0016/tlg001/tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng2.xml"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris (De Iside et Osiride) — tr. William Baxter, rev. W. W. Goodwin (1874), Perseus TEI edition",
        "url": "https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/blob/master/data/tlg0007/tlg089/tlg0007.tlg089.perseus-eng3.xml"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "E. A. Wallis Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914), Project Gutenberg #15932 via GITenberg",
        "url": "https://github.com/GITenberg/The-Literature-of-the-Ancient-Egyptians_15932/blob/master/15932.txt"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Hathor"
  }
}