# Talk:Four sons of Horus

Ok, I gotta admit, the authors detail and research are commendable.  Especially the parellel to the chinese philosophy.  The jokes "Broken hearts are caused by women..."  That's just funny.  Usually opinions entered into articles are done so by weasling but this is done with plain sarcasim that is suprisingly cute but not overwhelming and has actually made my Egyptian research more enjoyable.
--Trey Nitrotoluene 01:47, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

These stories behind the names -- it's the first I've ever heard of them -- Qebehsenuef is a reference to poison!? Imseti means kindly one!? Duamutef in reference to his motherland!? ims-ib means kindly -- but that has a different orthography. If there are no sources for any of this, this article should be scrapped. --Cliau 04:33, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree the derivation and meaning of the SoH given here are highly speculative and I intend to update.  I would like to know where they came from since I can find no reference to any of this in the books I have read.Apepch7 23:56, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

This is one of the most common artefact types of Egypt, since so many tombs, and mummies are in museums. I'm pretty sure some great examples (A Picture) of One of the four Canopic jars could be put on this page.  Michael intheHOTdesertofYUMA,Az--Mmcannis 13:10, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

A more appropriate picture would be a group of the 4 jars, good resolution, with the 4 differing lids on the jars.--MichaelinHotYUMA,Az--Mmcannis 17:24, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
I have added some pictures today - but these are the best I have - so if you have better. Apepch7 23:57, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

I have completely redone this page but I still have to add references (which are available) and further reading.  I liked some of the previous entry especially the link to forms of death but could find no justification for this view in Egyptology which makes it just an opinion not fact.Apepch7 11:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Umm ... the photos you have used are the Canopic Jars at the British Museum which have the heads of Duamutef and Quebesenuef swapped! Apparently they were made that way, but it might confuse people who are learning hieroglyphs.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hamstermoon (talk • contribs) 18:44, 15 September 2007 (UTC) 

I was wondering whether it would make sense to move any information about each of the Four Sons not already in this entry here and then turn the other entries into redirections to here. The reason I think this is that I am not sure there is very much to say about the Four Sons individually rather than as a group. 
Molybdomancer 23:15, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
There doesn't seem to be much in the individual entries that isn't in the main article - except perhaps the names of the seven spirits under Queb.  I think your suggestion is a good one. Apepch7 17:57, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Am guessing that Molybdomancer has already gone ahead with the merger, as there's little extra in the other offshoot articles. I recommend that you keep the links to the individual sons as is though, since more can be written about them outside of the canopic connotations presented here in this article.
Will try to spend some time tonight cleaning up the formatting for the article. Can somebody supply page references for the spells from the Book of the Dead referenced here?
Kudos to Apepch7 for supplying the main photo used at the top of the article. For the record there are others that could also be used on Wikimedia Commons, in a specific category for canopic jars. However the image on the four sons from the tomb of Ay appears to be derived from here, and ought to be removed (it's a good image, but it's arguably a copyright violation).
Cheers! Captmondo 00:13, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
I've removed the offending pic - no idea where I got it from probably where you said.  Shame because I think its significant link between these deities and the ancient pre-dynastic kings of Upper and Lower Egypt and may explain the jackal/hawk symbolism.  Ah well. Apepch7 21:29, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't disagree with you. Hopefully somebody will make a trip to the tomb of Ay someday, take a (flashless) pic and then post the image to Wikimedia Commons. Will keep an eye out for something else that might be able to used in its place if I run across it. Cheers! Captmondo 23:25, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

The pictures now appear in the entry for Hapi - but should be with the intro section can anyone move them I can't figure out how. Apepch7 (talk) 01:42, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

I've noted this and the Hapi (son of Horus)pages have been constantly vandalized and for that my confidence in it is a little bit hurt. I really cannot find any reliable reference linking the "Hapi" son of Horus with the direction north. Looks like it was a later edit and could be some sort of vandalism. Several online references, including [1] page 78 links Hapi with east direction. Also, unless I've looked in the wrong place, the Spell 148 of the Book of Dead don't even mention the sons of Horus, or Hapi specifically. Please take a look in the Hapi historic page to see what I'm talking about.
I would really like to have access to this suspicious reference 9: Lurker, op.cit., p.104. Anyone could check this one? It was created back in 14 august 2007 along with a batch by 'Andi d'. Please check here[2] the version history of Hapi

"Adtollite portas principes vestras" 23:45, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

In Richard Wilkinson's The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Thames & Hudson 2003, the associations of the Four Sons with directions, organs, animals, and goddesses are listed on p. 88 as follows:
"Imsety Human Liver South Isis
Duamutef Jackal Stomach East Neith
Hapy Baboon Lungs North Nephthys
Qebesenuef Falcon Intestines West Serket"
Wilkinson describes these as "geographic associations" while the book you linked calls it "direction of head" and either the two books are talking about something different, one of the two books is just wrong, or the direction varied from one burial to another.
- 97.127.85.66 (talk) 04:34, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

The picture didn't show the sons of Horus but the sons of Osiris (left to right: the elder Horus, Anubis, Makedon and the younger Horus).--2003:F5:F719:AA00:3C00:EDF3:2F7B:7EFB (talk) 10:33, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

@2003:F5:F719:AA00:3C00:EDF3:2F7B:7EFB: I'm sorry, but that's incorrect, and I don't know where you're getting your information from. The four sons of Horus were Imsety, Duamutef, Hapy, and Qebesenuef, and they were generally portrayed in these four animal-headed forms. As far as I know, Osiris was never said to have had four sons; most traditions seem to treat Horus as his only child, although some texts mention a daughter, Horit, whose name simply means "female Horus". A. Parrot (talk) 17:04, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

The Sons of Horus are on Egyptian papyri that were incorrectly translated by Joseph Smith to be the Book of Abraham.  One of translations says that the sons of Horus "Represents this earth in its four quarters." This specific article was specifically called out by Egyptologist Robert K. Ritner in this podcast as having been infiltrated by Mormon apologists to support Joseph Smith's inaccurate interpretation.  I am not an Egyptologist, and would like to throw it out to the wikipedia collective who hopefully has more experience before I start making too many edits, but from my research, it seems that the Sons of Horus were at times associated with cardinal directions, but did not represent the cardinal directions. Epachamo (talk) 18:52, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

@Epachamo: Having skimmed that video, I didn't find a point where Ritner said this article might have been distorted by apologists. He did say there was a POV-pushing WP article on "Shinehah", but I searched for one and didn't find it. In any case, I don't see anything in the current text that treats the Four Sons as personifying the directions rather than being associated with them. A. Parrot (talk) 22:09, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

"You are the great runner; come, that you may join up my father N and not be far in this your name of Hapi, for you are the greatest of my children – so says Horus".
"You have come to N; betake yourself beneath him and lift him up, do not be far from him, (even) N, in your name of Imsety." George Rodney Maruri Game (talk) 20:27, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

It's a convention for the name of the deceased person in a funerary text, which would vary depending on which individual copy of a text you're looking at. The Pyramid Texts in the pyramid of Unas would say "Unas" where, in the same spell, the Pyramid Texts of Pepi I would say "Pepi"; the Papyrus of Ani would say "Ani" at the same point where the Papyrus of Hunefer would say "Hunefer", and so forth. The "N" stands for "name", referring to the place where the name of the text's owner would go. A. Parrot (talk) 20:48, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

I've completed the merge, but I haven't moved anything from the merged articles into this one. The text for each of merged articles was pretty much the same as the text of the section on each son, because that text was actually copied from this article into those ones some time ago, in attempt to expand them. The only potentially useful things in those articles were a few images, but images of the four sons can be taken from the category on Commons as needed.
The extant text is a mess, too, no matter where it goes. Much of it seems to date from the days when User:-Ril- was writing dubious speculation in just about every article on an Egyptian deity. The result is a bunch of quotations from funerary texts strung together with original research, as in this passage about Hapi: "The spelling of his name includes a hieroglyph which is thought to be connected with steering a boat, although its exact nature is not known. For this reason he was sometimes connected with navigation, although early references call him the great runner: 'You are the great runner; come, that you may join up my father N and not be far in this your name of Hapi, for you are the greatest of my children – so says Horus'". We should not quote the most cryptic genre in all of ancient Egyptian literature willy-nilly; quotations should only be used when secondary sources point them out as particularly relevant.
I intend to rework the article over the next few weeks, to reflect what the secondary sources actually say and emphasize. Those sources show the sons have few individual characteristics aside from their respective connections with organs, directions, protective goddesses, and animal heads, and those attributes, as I said above, were somewhat interchangeable. So I may end up scrapping even the basic format of having one section for each deity, instead having sections that cover the group collectively. The set of sections I'm thinking of, which resembles the ones I used at Isis and Hathor, is: 1. Names and origins; 2 Roles; 3 Iconography; and 4. Worship.
If anyone has input on or objections to this, feel free to say so. A. Parrot (talk) 05:12, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I ended up being stuck on the four sons' connection with directions. There's no disputing that the Egyptians made such a connection, but I wasn't able to trace the standard scheme that you find in most sources (Imsety: south; Hapi: north; Duamutef: east; Qebehsenuef: west) to any Egyptian text.
Maarten Raven's article "Egyptian concepts on the orientation of the human body" (2005) seems to suggest two different systems of orientation in the inscriptions on coffins: one in the Middle Kingdom, when the coffin was ideally oriented with the head to the north, and another in the New Kingdom, when the coffin was ideally oriented with the head to the west. In the Middle Kingdom, Hapy's text was placed in the northwest quadrant of the coffin, Imsety's in the northeast, Duamutef's in the southeast, and Qebehsenuef's in the southwest. In the New Kingdom, it would be Hapi NW, Qebehsenuef NE, Duamutef SE, and Imsety SW. It doesn't seem that Imsety ever appeared on a southern quadrant of a coffin at the same time that Qebehsenuef appeared on a western one, so if Raven is correct, the usual scheme can't be based on the coffins.
I thought there could well be some other source for the conventional scheme in other types of Egyptian texts or iconography, but I couldn't track it down. I looked at all the references to the four sons in the three major funerary texts (Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and Book of the Dead) and found nothing there. Finally, I emailed Aidan Dodson, who wrote the article about the four sons in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, and his reply said "I was guilty of repeating 'common knowledge' when writing the OEAE entry many years ago, and it's also a long time (25+ years) since I’ve taken any particular research interest in the Four Sons of Horus… I would be interested if you can find an original source. There is a lot of Egyptology that has 'received wisdom' like this, and where it is tested, it is often found lacking."
The closest match to the conventional scheme that I can find is that (again, according to Raven) the four tutelary goddesses appeared on Middle Kingdom coffins with Nephthys at the head (north), Isis at the foot (south), and Serqet on the west side of the foot and Neith on the east. If you equate the four sons with the positions of their respective tutelary goddesses, you have the conventional scheme. Perhaps some nineteenth-century Egyptologist did exactly that, giving rise to the "received wisdom".
The conventional scheme is repeated widely enough that it has to be mentioned here, and no published reliable source that I know of has criticized it. But given Dodson's doubts, I will try to figure out a way to write about it without overtly criticizing it (which, in the absence of a source, would of course be OR) but also without implying that it is settled fact. A. Parrot (talk) 18:39, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
Well, after checking Raven yet again, I found that in the conclusion it does mention that some coffins place the four sons according to the conventional scheme, even though he doesn't discuss it at any point earlier in the paper (rrrgh). My apologies if I misled you, Dr. Dodson... Anyway, I'm going to upload a rewritten version of the article. A. Parrot (talk) 19:42, 23 April 2023 (UTC)