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| Hathor, Mycerinus and the goddess of the Jackal Nome. Such non-family triads may link deities through their support of the king. 4th Dynasty. Egyptian Museum. |
tri·ad Noun /ˈtrīˌad/Groups of three deities are often aligned as members of a divine family of father (god), mother (goddess) and child (almost invariably a young male deity), which the triad of Osiris, Isis and Horus being the most prominent example.
triads plural
- A group or set of three connected people or things
The Egyptian king sometimes functioned as the divine son or represented him in such familial triads. While not all combinations of three deities represent family groupings, this is the most common form. We find evidence of deities such as Amun and Osiris going from individual and independent Egyptian gods to members of fully formed triads (in these instances, Amun-Mut-Khonsu and Osiris-Isis-Horus, respectively) without any evidence of groups of two - as Amun-Mut or Osiris-Isis - existing between the singular deities and their triadic groupings.
On the other hand some deities which coexisted in pairs did eventually form triads which were only superficially regarded as families. This was evidently the case with Ptah and Sekhmet who were worshipped together as Memphis long before the god Nefertem was brought into their local grouping and the triad Ptah-Sekhmet-Nefertem was formed.
Other groups of three deities may have been formed for purely symbolic reasons. The number three was an important one signifying plurality - or unity expressed in plurality - for the ancient Egyptians and this is probably the underlying significance of many groups such as the important New Kingdom triad of Amun, Ra and Ptah. Beginning in the time of Tutankhamun and very commonly in Ramesside times, we find these three deities grouped by virtue of their status or importance in the pantheon.
Sometimes triads are grouped together by role alone. On the sarcophagus of the 21th Dynasty king Pinedjem II, thee deities with the heads of a ram, a lion and a jackal stand in the coils of a serpent. The deities are named as Ra, Isis and Anubis respectively though a number of variants of this same motif occur in which Egyptian gods may be depicted with the heads of other animals or given other names. This would seem to show that the groups are simply representative of important afterlife deities - the number three representing plurality rather than any specific group.
