Raet-Tawy

Raet-Tawy

by at least the 5th dynasty a female counterpart had been assigned to Re, the sun god, and the simple name of the goddess - the feminie form of the name Re - 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 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 gods", parallel to the superlative titles of her husband. Nevertheless, the goddess played a lesser role in Egyptian mythology than Hathor who was also viewed as the wife or daughter of Re. 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 in the fourth month of the harvest season, and she was venerated, along with Montu and Harpocrates, in the Graeco-Roman of Medamud.