MAAHES

I. The Name

Maahes name as a theonym is first attested in the Middle Kingdom on the Statue of Snofru found in the sanctuary of Heqaib at Elephantine. The Egyptian name of the god is written Mꜣἰ-ḥsꜣ, sometimes shortened to Mꜣἰ-ḥs, and it is a compound of two ordinary words. Mꜣἰ is the common noun for the male lion. Ḥsꜣ is the adjective for what is wild, savage or fierce. The name therefore means the fierce lion as explained by Christian Leitz.^{1, 2, 3, 4}

A second rendering, "he who is true beside her," is repeated in almost every popular account of the god and in a good many books that ought to know better. It construes the signs as mꜣꜥ, "true," with ḥr, "beside," and a feminine suffix. No lexical entry supports it, and Egyptologists do not use it.

The Greeks took the name over rather than translating it, and it appears in their documents as Μίυσις, Miysis, with the variants Μίος and Μίης.^{6, 7} The Egyptian form itself survives in Demotic. On a stela now in Hildesheim, beneath a scene of a king before a lion, runs the line pꜣ ḥtp-nṯr Mꜣἰ-ḥs pꜣ nṯr ꜥꜣ, "the god's domain of Miysis, the great god," a text edited by Sven Vleeming and entered by Leitz as the twenty-ninth attestation of the name.^{4, 6, 7, 8}

There is also a Greek translation, and it is the most revealing witness to how the name was heard. Paul Perdrizet proposed that the divine name Ὀρνυμένης, Ornymenes, which appears in a Ptolemaic building inscription for a lion god, renders the Egyptian Mꜣἰ-ḥsꜣ; the Greek participle is formed on ὄρνυμι, to rush upon or to rouse oneself to violence.The proposal was accepted by Jean Yoyotte and by Étienne Bernand, and the inscription in question, OGIS II 732, records building work for the temple of Ornymenes under Ptolemy V.^{9, 10, 11, 12}

The god also travelled under a compound name. On the Roman-period nome coinage of the Leontopolite nome he appears as Harmiysis, Ḥr-Mꜣἰ-ḥs, and the die-cutters figure him as a youthful Ares, once only as a lion.¹³

II. The Lion Before Maahes

The Pyramid Texts are full of lions referred to as Mꜣἰ but the idea of them containing a god named Maahes is nebulous. This is the central fact about his history that makes the imagery of the god rather ambiguous.¹⁴

The Old Kingdom lion powers have multiple attributes. Aker is the earth, figured as a double lion or as two lion foreparts set back to back, guarding the gates through which the sun passes at the horizon. Ruty, the Two Lions, are a pair later identified with Shu and Tefnut. Sekhmet and Shesmetet are lionesses, and Shesmetet carries the epithet Lady of Punt, which may point somewhere south.The king himself is repeatedly a lion, and he is repeatedly the son of a lioness. Utterance 262 states this part without qualification.⁶

N. is great. N. has come forth from between the thighs of the Ennead. N. was conceived by Sekhmet, it is Šsmt.t who gave birth to N., as the star with piercing glance and wide of stride, who brings provisions for his journey to Rē every day.
Pyramid Texts, §§ 262a–263a (Utterance 248 in Mercer's numbering), trans. Mercer¹⁴

Sekhmet is said to have conceived the pharaoh twice in the corpus, at § 262 and again at § 2206. The office that Maahes will later occupy, that of the lion son born of the lioness, is therefore filled in the Old Kingdom. Whether this relates to the royal symbolism of the lion god in later times is an open question.^14,15

Maahes is not extracted from the general lion vocabulary of these texts by argument. Mꜣἰ, rw and ḥsꜣ are ordinary Egyptian words. Their appearance in an Old Kingdom utterance no more attests a god called the Fierce Lion than the word for falcon attests Horus of Behdet. Every attempt to place Maahes in the Pyramid Texts that has been offered in the popular literature depends on that confusion. The dossier for the personification of Maahes, like many other latecomer Egyptian gods and gathered in the Lexikon, begins in the New Kingdom.⁴

What can be said about his emergence is modest, and it is worth saying carefully. The name is at home in the New Kingdom, where mꜣἰ ḥsꜣ, the fierce lion, is a stock expression of royal military rhetoric applied to the king in battle. The god becomes archaeologically visible under the Libyan dynasties, when Osorkon III builds him a sanctuary at Bubastis, and he becomes loud in the Late, Ptolemaic and Roman periods, when the Delta lion cult is documented by stelae, statuettes, coins, Greek inscriptions and the mummified bodies of the animals themselves. The likeliest history of Maahes is that a royal epithet hardened into a divine name. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that Maahes appears during a time of war and expansion for Egypt.^2,7,16,17

Maahes is sometimes said to be of Nubian origin, borrowed from the lion gods of the south. The comparison usually invoked is Apedemak, the lion god of Meroe, but Apedemak is attested from the third century BCE and Maahes from the New Kingdom, so the borrowing probably cannot have run in that direction. The foreign-origin hypothesis rests on no text. It rests on the assumption that the Egyptians would not have thought of a lion by themselves.¹⁸

III. The Epithets of Maahes

The titles of Maahes are a difficult case, and the difficulty is worth setting out rather than concealing. A short list of English epithets, Lord of the Massacre, Wielder of the Knife, the Scarlet Lord, Avenger of Wrongs, Protector of Sacred Places, circulates in every modern handbook and website. The Egyptian originals behind them are seldom given, and in several cases cannot be traced. The table separates the titles that are attested in edited texts from the titles that are merely repeated.

IV. The Temples

Taremu, the City of Lions

The chief seat of the god was Tꜣ-rmw, Taremu, the land of fish, capital of the eleventh nome of Lower Egypt, which the Greeks called Leontopolis (Lion City) and which lies today under the mound of Tell el-Muqdam in the central Delta. The city was a seat of royal power under the Twenty-third Dynasty, and Piye names its ruler Iuput II among the princes he subdued. Carol Redmount and Renée Friedman excavated there in the 1990s but their reports describe a large and badly denuded settlement mound, scarce in evidence.¹⁹

What survives of it came out of the ground piecemeal. Bronze statuettes of lions were found in the ruins of the temple in 1884 and passed into the Fouquet collection, published by Émile Chassinat and by Paul Perdrizet. More important is a corpus of limestone stelae which began appearing in the Cairo antiquities shops in 1885, and which Willy Clarysse and Haying Yan catalogued in 2007, bringing the total to nineteen. They share a single scene. A Pharaoh in the double crown offers the hieroglyph for "field" to a lion seated or standing on a pedestal, with a sun disk and uraeus above the animal's head and a winged disk in the lunette.^7,20,21

The inscriptions are emblematic of certain evidence since where the lion stands, the text above his back reads pꜣ my ꜥnḫ, "the living lion." Where he crouches, it reads Wsἰr pꜣ my, "Osiris the lion." Beneath the scene on the stela in the Peking University Museum a single line of demotic reads pꜣ ꜥ.wy n tꜣ qs.t n pꜣ my, "the house of the burial of the divine lion," and the stela in the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam has the same statement in Greek: οἰκία τῆς ταφῆς τῶν λεόντων ἱερά, "house of the tomb of the lions; sacred."⁷

Dimitri Meeks classified these objects as pseudo-donation stelae, since the king offers a field sign and no land actually changes hands. Clarysse and Yan argue, against Yoyotte, that the phrase means what it says, and that the stelae stood at or inside the real tombs of the sacred lions, in the way that the Buchis stelae stood in the bull cemetery at Armant. The Beijing stela bears the cartouche of a Cleopatra, cut by a local sculptor who went on showing the offering pharaoh as a man because that is what the scene required.^7,12,22

Bubastis

At Bubastis, the city of his mother, Maahes had a house of his own. It stood north of the great temple of Bastet, a rectangular structure with red granite palm and papyrus-bundle columns, and it was identified as a sanctuary of Mihos by Labib Habachi, working over ground that Édouard Naville had opened in the 1880s. The building is attributed to Osorkon III of the Twenty-third Dynasty and postdates the temple of Bastet beside which it was set.^17,23,24 Nothing now remains above the foundations.

Richard Wilkinson notes that the sanctuary functions in the manner of the later Ptolemaic birth houses, tying the birth of the divine son to the birth of the Pharaoh who built it. The royal symbolism seems to have a running thread that links the cult of Maahes with the Mammissi and Horus.

Saqqara and the Burial of the Lions

The lion cult was not confined to the Delta. A late Ptolemaic papyrus, still unpublished, refers to the ταφὴ καὶ τροφὴ λεόντων, the burial and the feeding of the lions, and is quoted by John Ray in his edition of the archive of Hor. Archeologists published lion mummies from the animal cemetery at Saqqara in 1997. In 2001 the skeleton of an adult male lion was found in the tomb of Maïa at the Bubasteion at Saqqara and published in Nature magazine by Cécile Callou, Anaïck Samzun and Alain Zivie; the animal had reached old age in captivity, and the wear on its teeth shows that it had been fed by hand for a long time. It is the first hard zoological confirmation that Egyptians kept lions and buried them.^25,26,27

V. The Son of Sekhmet and Bastet

Maahes is defined by his mother, and which mother depends on where the text was written. At Bubastis he is the son of Bastet, and his sanctuary stands in her precinct. In the Memphite and southern material he is the son of Sekhmet, whose rage is the more famous of the two and has a higher consistency with who Maahes is as a god. The distinction was less important to the Egyptians than it is to modern catalogues, because Bastet and Sekhmet are one power in two tempers, both are lionesses in their primeval form.^6,17,24

Ra is named as the father of Maahes in some accounts and Ptah in others, and the assignment to Ptah deserves a word of caution, since at Memphis the son of Ptah and Sekhmet is Nefertem. Placing Maahes in that seat is a secondary equation, and it is repeated in the handbooks more confidently than the evidence allows. The parentage of Maahes is the divine descent from the lioness.^6,16

The theology of that descent is not sentimental. Sekhmet is the goddess who almost destroys mankind and has to be tricked into stopping, and the Egyptians surrounded her with an apparatus of appeasement: the litanies of the seven arrows, the knife-bearing messengers who ride out at the turn of the year, and the rites of the five epagomenal days when her emissaries are abroad and the year hangs in the balance. Philippe Germond assembled this material in his study of Sekhmet and the protection of the world, and it is the necessary background to her son. The rage of the lioness is real and it has to be aimed. Maahes is the aiming of it.²⁸

His childhood is a matter of descent rather than of infancy, and here he differs from the other divine children of Egypt. Harpocrates is shown naked, with a finger at his lip and the side-lock of youth, sitting on his mother's knee. Maahes is shown as a grown male lion, or as a man with a lion's head, standing, dressed in a short kilt, wearing the atef crown or carrying a bouquet of lotuses, and frequently holding a knife. No artist shows him at the breast. The word "prince," which the modern literature uses of him constantly, describes his rank accurately and his age not at all.^6,29

On one of the Copenhagen stelae the lion appears in company: Isis-Hathor, Bastet in the form of a lion-headed cobra, and Miysis wearing the atef crown, a grouping identified by Yoyotte. The son stands beside the mother in the same frame, crowned, armed, and fully grown.^7,12

VI. The Lord of the Massacre

The most direct statement of what Maahes was for comes from the coinage. Under the Roman emperors the nomes of Egypt struck bronze issues showing their local gods, and the Leontopolite nome put Harmiysis on its coins in the figure of a youthful Ares, once only as a lion.

The iconography shows the essence of the god. He carries a knife, and the lion-headed man with a blade is a figure of execution rather than of combat. He does not fight duels in the myths, as Horus fights Seth or as Montu attends the Pharaoh in the heat of battle at Kadesh. He destroys what has been condemned, and in line with all of this, the Lord of the Massacre is an important title of Maahes attested at the Ptolemaic temple of Horus at Edfu.^6,13,16

Behind this stands the older military language of the New Kingdom, in which the king in battle is a fierce lion, mꜣἰ ḥsꜣ, raging among his enemies. The phrase belongs to the standard vocabulary of royal victory rhetoric, and the Kadesh inscriptions of Ramesses II use the leonine image with great freedom showing a kind of parallelism with the divine presence of the fierce lion.^2,29

His enemies are cosmic as well as political. The lion-headed powers stand in the retinue of Ra, and the knife is turned against Apep in the nightly passage of the solar barque. Maahes is one of the weapons carried in it.

VII. Weather, and the Guarding of the Threshold

Maahes is described in the reference literature as a god of weather and storms, and the claim is made without a source in almost every place it appears, showing how Egyptology sometimes devolves into Chinese whispers. The primary testimony is Plutarch, who reports that the Egyptians honour the lion and set gaping lions' heads at the doorways of their shrines, and who explains the custom by the inundation, which begins when the sun enters Leo. He quotes Aratus for the astronomy.^30,31

Of the stars the Egyptians think that the Dog-star is the star of Isis, because it is the bringer of water. They also hold the Lion in honour, and they adorn the doorways of their shrines with gaping lions' heads, because the Nile overflows "When for the first time the Sun comes into conjunction with Leo."
Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 38 (366A), trans. Babbitt³⁰

Plutarch has given a Greek explanation of a genuine Egyptian fact. The temples of Egypt discharge their rainwater through spouts cut in the form of lions' heads, projecting from the roof line, and they are found at Dendera, at Edfu, at Philae and at Karnak.³² The storm that falls on the roof of the god's house leaves it through the mouth of a lion. Whether or not any Egyptian priest connected that spout with Maahes by name, the association of the lion with the violent water of the sky is built into the architecture, and it is not a modern invention.

The second strand is the destructive air itself. The messengers of Sekhmet ride out on the wind at the turn of the year and bring the plague with them, and the whole apparatus of the epagomenal rites exists to turn them aside.Weather in Egypt is not rain in any quantity that matters; it is the khamsin, the pestilential wind, the sky darkening out of season. The leonine powers govern exactly this, and Maahes belongs to their family through his mother.²⁸

The third strand is the lion at the gate. Couchant lions and sphinxes flank the entrances of Egyptian temples, and lion legs carry the beds, the thrones and the chairs of the living. Protector of Sacred Places, the title the handbooks give him, is not attested in any Egyptian text I can trace, and it is a fair summary of what the animal is doing on the threshold. The god of the doorway is the god who decides who may pass, showing maybe a parallel to Nergal.⁶

The god was also invoked in magic. Mios and Miosis appear in the Greek magical text catalogued as SB I 5620 and edited by Reinhold Merkelbach, which puts a lion god of this name into the working repertoire of Roman Egypt. What can honestly be said is this. The connection of the lion with the storm, the inundation and the threshold is documented in the architecture, in the classical testimony and in the Sekhmet material. The connection of Maahes by name with the weather rests, at present, on how the lion is a weather power. Whether Maahes is more dubious.³³

VIII. The Festivals

The festival evidence for Maahes is thin, foreign, and unexpectedly vivid. Almost none of it is Egyptian in language. What survives comes from Greek visitors, from Greek dating formulae, and from the papers of a Ptolemaic estate manager who happened to pass through the town.

The one date we have is 9 Mecheir. The lion stela in the Ägyptisches Museum in Leipzig carries a badly cut Greek line beneath the offering scene which appears to read "year 3, Mecheir 9." Clarysse and Yan set this beside the Zenon archive. In the twenty-eighth year of Ptolemy II Philadelphus the dioiketes Apollonios and his agent Zenon were at Bubastis from the sixteenth to the twenty-sixth of March, were at Leonton polis at the beginning of April, and moved on to Mendes on the eleventh; the letter P.Lond. VII 1938 was despatched to Zenon on 9 Mecheir. The party appears to have timed its visit to the local festival. For a town as obscure as this one, the coincidence of the two dates is worth noticing.^7,34

For the daily cult there is Aelian's account. His is really the locus classicus for the entire lion cult of Egypt because his account of the city of the lions is precise about things in a way that is strongly evocative: the boneless meat, the singing during the meal, the exercise yards, and the calf provided so that the animals could keep in practice.^35,36

In Egypt they worship lions and there is a city called after them. They have temples and very many spaces in which to roam; the flesh of oxen is supplied to them daily and it lies, stripped of bones and sinews, scattered here and there, and while the lions eat songs are sung in the Egyptian language... And to preserve their health they have places to exercise and wrestling-grounds near by, and their adversary is a well-nourished calf. And after practising his skill against the calf, the lion brings it down (this takes time, for he is lazy and unused to hunting), he eats his fill and returns to his own stable.
Aelian, De natura animalium 12.7, trans. Scholfield³⁵

Strabo, the earliest Greek writer to mention the nome, says only that the people there worship a lion, and that this is why the town has the name it has. Diodorus, describing the consecration of animals in Egypt, gives the general practice into which the Leontopolite lions fit. The stelae of the sacred lion stood at the house of the tomb of the lions, and the animal, once dead, was Osiris the lion.^7,37,38

The lion names outlasted the temples Greek agonistic inscription from the city, listing its ephebes as late as 220 CE, is crowded with personal names formed on λέων and on ἰσχυρός, the lion and the strong, and attention has been drawn in Egyptology to the density of them.³⁹ Three centuries after the last Ptolemy, in a city under Roman administration, the young men of Leontopolis were still being named after the animal in the temple.