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deinemuddalutscht · 2 months

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Why Marvel spelled it "Khonshu"

First of all, there is not one correct spelling of this name as Egyptian hieroglyphics cannot be directly translated into the alphabet, and the pronunciation and spelling of the name have changed over the millennia.

To understand where this spelling comes from, one must first look at the history of the name: The spelling in the Old and Middle Kingdoms suggests that the name was pronounced something like χansVw. The V stands for a short unknown vowel that could not be recreated because ancient Egyptian script has no vowels. That's why direct transcriptions of hieroglyphics just write the name as "hnsw". The spellings Khonsu, Chensu, Chonsu, Khonsou, Chonsou, Khesnu, and Khensou are all derived from hnsw/χansVw, .

However, "Khonsu" is not the "authenthic" pronunciation of the name, because a) the English Khonsu is pronounced xɛnsu and not χansVw, and b) the original name for Khonsu contains the unknown vowel. It is even quite possible that Egyptians of the Old Kingdom used a different vowel for the name than the ones of the Middle Kingdom. In the Amarna period, the name was pronounced ˈχansə, and around 800 BCA, it was χans. Interestingly, the pronunciation ˈχansə seems to have survived in the Meroitic language in words like uṣiḫaanša. From χans, the spellings Chons, Khens, Khons, Hons, etc., are derived. In Coptic, χans became Ϣⲟⲛⲥ, from which the spellings Shons and Schons are derived. Additionally, there is a Hellenized version of the name: Chespisichis/Khespisíkhis, from which, for example, the Portuguese name for Khonsu, Quespisiquis, is derived. The Greek version did not become the dominant form however, unlike for other gods such as Osiris, Isis, Seth, Nephthys, Horus and Anubis (Ausar, Aset, Sutekh Nebet-het, Heru and Anpu are the actual Egyptian versions of their names)

For reasons that will be important later, I first need to explain Khonsus role in the Theban pantheon. Every ancient Egyptian city had its own hierarchy and local versions of gods and myths. Different attributes and tasks were assigned to different gods in different citys. Amun, Khonsu, and Mut were the patron gods of Thebes, though they were relatively unknown until Thebes became the capital city of Egypt. This led to the cults of these gods becoming extremely popular. It is hard to comprehend just how incredibly powerful the priesthood of Amun was.: the priests of Amun were rulers in their own rights during the 21st Dynasty, and in the Greco-Roman period people used the Temple of Khonsu in Karnak to make temple oaths that governed civil matters like debts, compensations, inheritance, and divorce. Thus, the priesthoods in Karnak held significant power within Ancient Egyptian society.

I believe Marvel had difficulty understanding that Egyptian mythology did not have THE ONE pantheon that stood above the rest of the gods, like the 12 Olympians or the gods of Asgard. The Ennead of Heliopolis, was very important in the city of Heliopolis as it had two primary functions: 1) It served as a divine council for resolving disputes among the gods, and 2) as a generation of creation gods. Cosmogonies (creation myths) were different in every city, with each city placing its local gods at the top of the creation chain. In Thebes, the Ennead also existed, but it played a significantly smaller role in the Theban pantheon since they were not considered to be the gods who actually created the world. Additionally, it partially consisted of different gods than the "classic" Ennead. Thus, the Theban Ennead primarily served as the court and council of the god-king Amun-Ra. While Osiris and Horus were still considered to be quite important compared to the rest of the Ennead, they were very much merged with the Theban versions of Amun and Khonsu. Tasks that were typically attributed to Isis in other cities, for example, were assigned to "Hathor chief of Thebes" (a local Theban version of Hathor, not to be confused with "Hathor within the Benenet": another local Theban version of Hathor who was revered as the consort of Khonsu-Neferhotep).

There are several Theban cosmogonies, but they generally follow this pattern: At the beginning, there was a creator god who was a form of Amun. This creator god had a son(s) who were sometimes deities like Khonsu and Tatennen, but also could be other aspects of Amun (for example, in some inscriptions, the creator god Amun Kematef creates his "son" Amun Irita, but Amun Irita is just another version of Amun. This differentiation is sometimes made in Theban inscriptions to distinguish Amun as the dead creator god from Amun the king of the gods and Amun as part of the Ogdoad). The creator god then creates the eight gods of the Ogdoad with this son. The ogdoad is a group of four male-female twin pairs that in other cities is the very first generation of gods. The Ogdoad then together creates some form of the sun god, who then creates the Ennead.

The new Kingdom period made Khonsu into A creator god and sometimes even THE creator god The depiction of Khonsu as THE creator god is much rarer and is due to a fusion with Amun-Ra. He was known as “Khonsu, the great one, who comes forth from the primordial water” (as seen on the statue of Harwa from the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty in the Egyptian Museum, the magical healing statue of Hor in the Turin Museum from the Thirtieth Dynasty, the healing statue of a priest of the goddess Bastet in the Louvre Museum from the Thirtieth Dynasty, the healing statue of Psammetikseneb in the Florence Museum from the Thirtieth Dynasty, and in the inscription of Mentuemhat in the temple of the goddess Mut at Karnak from the end of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and the beginning of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty respectively). In his form as the creator god who emerged from the primordial water, he was sometimes represented as a double hawk-headed man with four wings standing on two crocodiles as a symbol of his triumph over chaos. Alternatively, he was rarely represented as a creator god in the form of a crocodile with the head of a hawk, lying on a pedestal. According to the historian Armour, the two heads of the hawk represent the sun and moon. They also probably symbolize Khonsu as a divine lunar equivalent of the creator sun god. In this form, he combines the sun and the moon in a single creature, thus, he could be conceived as a mythical complex personification of death and rebirth simultaneously.

Khonsu-Re was known since the late New Kingdom, but he lost significance during the Greco-Roman period. We often imagine the triad consisting of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu as a father, mother, and child dynamik, but like everything in Egyptian Mythology, the family tree is more of a cycle: Mut could be the mother, daughter, and wife of Amun(-Ra), Amun was the father of Khonsu, but at the same time, Khonsu was also seen as a form that Amun takes at night or at the beginning of the new day, and Mut was the mother of Khonsu, but she was occasionally also referred to as his daughter. ("Khonsu who arrives as an infant after old age, made by his daughter, fashioned by his J-serpent, through her [Mut], he is greatest of gods and goddesses. That she gave birth to him in Thebes was in the form of an august child, the rn/i-scarab, in his manifestation of Khepri"). The reason for this is that the births of the sun and moon were not understood as one-time events but as events that repeated every day, month, or year (daily birth of the moon symbolizing the rising of the moon, monthly births symbolized the beginning of a new moon cycle, and yearly birth symbolized the beginning of a new year and the start of spring). As the sun and moon, Amun and Khonsu are children who grow old, die, and are then reborn in an ever-renewing cycle.

Khonsu as A creator god is the more commonly attributed role to him in Thebes and is more associated with his role as the son of Amun rather than as a moon and sun god. The khonsu cosmogony makes him into the second god to emerge from the primodial water after Amun-Ra Kematef. Basically Amun ejaculates the into the waters, Khonsu then swallows the seed, becomes pregnant by it and travels to earth to give birth to the Ogdoad on the so called island of flames. In a way all gods can be considered the sons of Amun(-Ra) but Khonsu fills the role of THE son of Amun: the firstborn, the heir, the most important, and the most revered. This position naturally aligns him with Shu, who in the Heliopolitan cosmogony is the firstborn son of Re. In fact, Khonsu adopts many aspects of Shu: like how he is regarded as a wind god and the holder of the sky. Early Egyptologists even thought that Shu and Khonsu were the same deity. I still have an annotated version of Herodotus' work from the 18th century, where the footnotes claim that Shu in Thebes was called "Khonsu Neferhotep." The confusion arose from some Ancient Egyptian inscriptions that used "Shu" as an epithet after the Khonsus name, which literally gives the name Khons-shu or Khonshu (as I have already explained, Khons/Chons was the spelling usally used during the late New Kingdom). But the Shu in Khonshu was not just an epithet but this merged form also had its own cult.

God splitting happens when an epithet becomes so interwoven with a particular epithet that it forms its own subaspect of the "main" deity. Like how "Hathor in Benenet", "Hathor, chief of Thebes" and "Hathor, chief of Dendra" are all aspects of Hathor with the epitheth stating which role they take on in the pantheon. Distinguishing between different forms of the same god can be quite important since there can be significant differences when it comes to their priesthood, temple attributes and their place in the Egyptian family tree. God splitting was very common fo Khonsu in Thebes: "Khonsu-Neferhotep," "Khonsu-pa-ir-sekher," "Khonsu-pa-chered," "Khonsu-wen-nekhu," "Khonsu-Shu," and "Khonsu-Thoth" all had their own small priesthoods in the Karnak Temple Complex. The priesthood of Khonshu did not have its own temple, unlike "Khonsu-pa-chered" or "Khonsu-pa-ir-sekher," but was housed in the main temple of Khonsu in Thebes, the so-called Benenet.

Essentially, all offshoots of Khonsu are differnet aspects for Khonsu-Neferhotep, who had by far the largest and most important priesthood. And Khonsu-Neferhotep is the aspect of Khonsu that gained the most importance. Therefore Khonshu is a part of Khonsu-Neferhotep and Khonsu-Neferhotep is a part of Khonsu. That is why Khonsu during the Old Kingdom was so different from the Khonsu of the New Kingdom period: The theban version of him eclipsed basically all of the bloodthirsty, cannibal versions of him that might have existed in other city during the Middle Kingdom Other Khonsus in other cities. That is essentially why it is so difficult to understand Khonsus's original role in the Old and Milde kingdoms aside from the bloodthirsty underworld deity. It even debatable to which extent the Khonsu in the pyramid texts and coffin texts was a moon god to begin with and when he first became associated with the falcon. It is difficult to say who Khonsu was before became Khonsu-Neferhotep, the patron god of Thebes. Therefore it might be more accurate to say that Khonsu-Neferhotep isn't just a partial aspect of Khonsu, he straight up became THE Khonsu. We do not even know what the cult of Theban Khonsu was like before Ramesses III built the Benenet and Hatshepsut grouped him together with Amun and Mut to triad, because nothing of the Pre-Benenet temple survived, just the knowledge that there existed one.

In any case, Khonshu primarily embodied Khonsu's aspect as a sun and creator god, which is why I have focused so much on these aspects. Therefore, he is referred to in inscriptions in various ways, such as: "He who sails to Western Thebes daily, who leaves offerings for the Great Ba of Kematef, who is there as Amun, in the Underworld chamber with the Bas of the Ogdoad." or "He who enters Manu bearing offerings for the Father of fathers of the Ogdoad, so that his face lights up and his heart rejoices upon seeing him, as the august child when he enters the Eye-of-Re (Thebes)." Or "He who returns pregnant from the Grotto of Nun with the prestige of his father in his body." Basically some priests of Khonsu-Neferhotep thought that the myth in which Khonsu becomes pregnant by drinking his fathers semen, and then fucks the universe into existence with Hathor is a linguistic masterpiece that deserved its own cult.

Presumably, the cult around Khonshu had something to do with ancestor worship, as it describes how Khonshu leaves offerings for Amun Kematef and the Ogdoad. In the Theban tradition, the first creator god and the Ogdoad are often described as being dead gods, which contrasts sharply with the idea that Amun should be the king of the gods. This is why there is a differentiation between Amun Kematef, the dead first creator god, and Amun Irita, the living creator god and king of the gods. Simultaneously, the epithet "Father of the Fathers of the Ogdoad" is used to distinguish Kematef and Irita from Amun of the Ogdoad. Some cosmogonies, like the Khonsu cosmogony, avoid this confusion altogether by simply replacing the last pair of the Ogdoad (Amun and Amunet) with the twin pair Nia and Niat. Technically, there is also a fourth generation of Amun, because the sun god that the Ogdoad collectively conceives (don't ask me how they managed that. The gene pool of the Ancient Egyptian Gods is just a puddle at this point) is often another aspect of Amun, like Amenope.

#egyptian gods #egyptian mythology #khonsu #khonshu #moon knight #what happened in the primordial waters stays in the primordial waters

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