Talk:Taweret

Requested move

This article has been renamed from Tawaret to Taweret as the result of a move request.

The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was - Move as no oposition. Keith D (talk) 23:10, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

The spelling Taweret is used in modern sources, whereas Tawaret and the other spellings are long outdated. Taweret also gets more ghits than Tawaret. The article Taweret was created in 2002 and later merged into this article, which was created as a duplicate. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 18:38, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Support move. Looks like a pretty straightforward one. It appears that the only book that has been written on the topic uses taweret as well. --JayHenry (talk) 18:49, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

The entire (pop) cultural references section should probably be deleted. It had stated that Tawaret comes up in "The Red Tent" a lot, and this has been removed and replaced with a section on Lost's season 5 finale official summary and a wired puzzle. Despite the written claims that the statue is Tawaret, it only resembles Sobek. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.254.120.236 (talk) 16:21, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Was Taweret an Egyptian representation of a bear?

The creature representing Taweret has a lot of features similar to that of the bear. Budge refers to the goddess as Taurit. The Egyptian "Ta urit" could also mean "land of the dead". An Eye of Horus (the Moon) is also referred to as Urit. The depiction is consistent with a powerful nocturnal creature such as the bear which is also know to hibernate. The life-death-rebirth cycle of the Phrygian counterpart Cybele supports this interpretation. And the feminine form of the Latin word for the bear is ursa which has a similar root.--Jbergquist (talk) 08:44, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

This is a good and intriguing question! However, the definitive answer is no. Depictions of the goddess in this form are known from dynastic Egypt (before 3000 BCE), so it is unlikely that she is borrowed from a Phrygian or Latin tradition. The name "Weret" (or "Urit," as Budge normalizes it) is common for many things in ancient Egyptian because it literally means "that which is great." Bears were likely not well-known to the Egyptians, as they are not native to Egypt and it is unlikely that the Egyptians would have had widespread exposure to these creatures. However, hippopotami were certainly native to the Nile River, and this is the basic form that Taweret takes. If she appears with some mammal attributes, they are those of a lioness, as Taweret's fearsome nature linked her to other protective goddesses (primarily feline in form) like Sekhmet. KierraF (talk) 18:40, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Sources

Are there ANY books dedicated to this goddess floating about? I simply can't find anything but brief and fleeting entries. Any help would be massively appreciated! KierraF (talk) 18:45, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

The only one I know of is The Transformation of Egyptian Taweret into the Minoan Genius: A study in cultural transmission in the Middle Bronze Age by Judith Weingarten. I haven't read it and don't know how much it says about Taweret in Egypt. Of course there are overview entries in the general sources on Egyptian deities—Richard Wilkinson's Complete Gods and Goddesses, George Hart's Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt.

One would hope that sources on popular religion in AE (like Magic in Ancient Egypt by Geraldine Pinch, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt by Emily Teeter, and Popular Religion in Egypt during the New Kingdom by Ashraf Sadek) would have more information about her, since that was the area in which she was most important, but I don't remember them giving a lot of detail about her. Popular religion is still an under-examined field. I would hope some future study would examine the ways different deities were worshipped among the populace, but so far I think that's only been done, in a cursory way, for Deir el-Medina. A. Parrot (talk) 19:14, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Looking at the bibliographies of the sources I do have, I discovered a couple of studies. One is "La statue de Thouéris au Caire (GC 39145) et la legénde de la déesse lointaine" by I. Nagy in The Intellectual Heritage of Ancient Egypt, 1992, edited by Ulrich Luft. The other is "A Statue of Tweret (Cairo Museum no. 39145) Dedicated by Pabesi and Several Remarks on the Role of the Hippopotamus Goddess" by Miroslav Verner, in Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Alterumskunde 96, 1969. It shows how limited the examination of Taweret has been if both these studies focus on the same statue, but it sounds like they use the statue as a starting point to discuss her more generally. If you can find either of these sources, they may help. A. Parrot (talk) 19:32, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

As always, your help is absolutely appreciated. Thankfully, I have access to a library that has Weingarten's book, so I'll give it a look (fingers-crossed). I consulted the articles you cited, and they are, unfortunately, quite cursory - the content is much more focused on Pabesi and his role as a dedicant than the goddess herself. I didn't think to check Teeter's or Sadek's books, so thank you for pointing me there as well.

I don't remember precisely what the bibliography in "The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt" was, but I do remember that it was alarmingly sparse, including only basic overviews of Egyptian magic. (Maybe just Pinch's book? I can't remember...) It's actually absurd how little energy has been dedicated to a goddess who was so integral to daily life. Even Ritner's "Mechanics" overlooks her! KierraF (talk) 20:33, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Same as Ipy

Hey I created this article on this one goddess called Ipy. And I keep finding sources indicating Ipy and Taweret are the same deity. Can someone help me out with this?CycoMa (talk) 20:51, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

I found [this source] mentioning Ipy and Taweret.CycoMa (talk) 20:59, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

However, [this source] indicates they weren’t the same deity.CycoMa (talk) 21:00, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

@CycoMa: The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by Richard Wilkinson says on pp. 183–184: "Already in the Old Kingdom there were at least three names or distinct forms of the female hippopotamus deity: Ipet, Reret and Taweret. Generally their characteristics were similar and it is often impossible to tell them apart, yet it is not always clear whether they should be viewed as differing forms of the same goddess or as separate, if largely conflated, deities." So it's really not clear, even to the experts. Wilkinson does have separate entries for each deity, and, as you've seen, George Hart's Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses also lists Ipy/Ipet separately from Taweret.

If you're suggesting the two articles should be merged, I don't have an opinion either way. A. Parrot (talk) 01:55, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

After doing more research on this I kinda realized why this was the case. So never mind about merging them.CycoMa (talk) 16:41, 17 September 2021 (UTC)