Female Anthropomorphic Egyptian Gods: Raet
By at least the
5th Dynasty a female counterpart had been assigned to Ra, the sun god, and the simple name of the goddess - the feminine form of the name Ra - indicates that she was created to complement the sun god rather than having been a deity with an independent prior existence. In the Pyramid Texts the goddess is called
Raet and and though a fuller variant of her name was Raettawy, 'Raet of the Two Lands', it is uncertain at what point this form was first used. In later times she was addressed by the expanded titles 'Raet of the Two Lands, the lady of heaven, mistress of the Egyptian gods', parellel to the superlative titles of her husband. Nevertheless, the goddess played a lesser role in
ancient Egyptian mythology than
Hathor who was also viewed as the wife or daughter of Ra. Raet is therefore not frequently represented pictorially and is usually depicted in a Hathor-like form as a woman wearing a solar disk with horns and a uraeus, sometimes with the addition of two feathers above the disk. A festival of Raet was held in the fourth month of the harvest season, and she was venerated, along with Montu and Harpokrates, in the Graeco-Roman temple of Medamud.
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