# Talk:Eye of Ra

This review is transcluded from Talk:Eye of Ra/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Redtigerxyz (talk · contribs) 10:26, 5 February 2012 (UTC)


### Response by A. Parrot
I have made several adjustments to this article to address the 1a concerns. I have also made a separate article on Mehet-Weret, who is not synonymous with Hathor, and adjusted Hathor's article accordingly. I have looked at all uses of "eye" and have capitalized in in several cases, but I kept it in lowercase when the word refers to an eye, in general, and not a specific Eye of Ra or Horus or Atum. (In the case where Ra "grows a new eye" I left it in lowercase, because I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a second Eye of Ra or just an eyeball.) Regarding maat, books on Egyptian religion often write maat when referring to it as a word or a concept and Maat when referring to the goddess. I prefer to maintain that distinction.
As for original research, I have been very careful about that. The connections between the various Eye goddesses have been staring me in the face for a long time, but I didn't write anything about them until I had sources that explicitly describe those connections.
I don't know how you might go about checking all of my sources, but I'll address your example about the clay cobras, where the text that verifies the claim verifies a lot of the other facts in the article. When speaking about the spell inscribed on O. Gardiner 363, the spell that involves the clay uraei, Ritner says: 

In all such cases, the function of the uraeus hearkens back to its well-known origin as the 'fiery eye' of the sun god sent forth against the god's enemies, whether human, divine, or as in O. Gardiner 363, demonic.
A few pages later, he says:

Concomitant with the developing ritualized use of four uraei is an increasingly elaborate theological interpretation and identification of the serpents themselves as hypostases of the solar eye… The four "persons" represented by the clay uraei of the Gardiner ostracon comprise… an appropriation of the defense of the solar bark for a private bedroom.
Szpakowska does not specifically mention the Eye of Ra in relation to the clay cobras (although she does say that the cobra represents "the fiery power of the sun"), but her footnotes point to Ritner's study for details about the beliefs underlying their use. I used Szpakowska's study only to support the statement, which she makes, that the cobras may never have been used to burn anything.
As for the question-mark signs for criteria 1b and 6b, I would like to see the specifics of your concerns so I can address them. A. Parrot (talk) 02:34, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
I give this article 1 more week. The nominator needs to be go back and check if all sources explicitly relate the things said to the Eye of Ra. Szpakowska does not relate the cobras to the Eye, but the article sentence referenced to the book does. "Whether literal or metaphorical, the flames in the cobras' mouths, like the fiery venom spat by the Eye of Ra, were meant to dispel the nocturnal darkness". Another example of OR could be "The characteristics of the Eye of Ra were an important part of the Egyptian conception of female divinity in general.[21] Therefore, the Eye was equated with many goddesses". I googled Google Books most associations are there, so the article has some OR currently, but not much. Some books/sites [1][2] show the right eye as an image for the Eye of Re. Not sure if it should be included. --Redtigerxyz  Talk  17:47, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I have gone over the sources again and removed from the article any statement that is not present in them. There are cases where I stated things that the sources do not state but strongly imply; unfortunately, it's easy to do that when one is immersed in the subject matter, even when one is watching out for it. Everything remaining in the article is directly connected to the Eye of Ra, except the passages by Lesko talking about the sun disk. I left those parts in because the sun disk may not always be the Eye of Ra, but unquestionably it very often is the Eye of Ra (Troy practically treats the two terms synonymously), and I think it gives a better idea of what the Eye is if the article states that the Disk-Thing That Is Sometimes the Eye of Ra may actually be a sphere.
I would have liked to include an image of an actual eye, but part of the problem is that I don't think the Egyptians applied the right eye/left eye distinction very strictly. For example, this famous amulet from Tutankhamun's tomb is always labeled as an Eye of Horus, even though it's a right eye. There is one image of an eye that, according to an Egyptological book I have, specifically represents the Eye of Ra: a vignette from the Book of the Dead of Neferrenpet in which Thoth gives the Eye to Ra. Unfortunately, I can't find an image of it except in rather low-quality black and white. I could add that image, but considering its quality, I'd rather not. A. Parrot (talk) 00:28, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
GA Pass. --Redtigerxyz  Talk  17:45, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
Note: In my zeal to demonstrate the article's accuracy, I used long quotations from Ritner's paper in my post on February 6. Not wanting to violate copyright law or Wikipedia rules about non-free content, I am now greatly shortening these quotations. A. Parrot (talk) 01:36, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I think a lot of gods and goddesses 73.119.18.48 (talk) 00:37, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

The Eye of Ra (right wedjat) and the Eye of Horus (left wedjat) are necessarily paired, being the mirror image of each other. A short hint to this info is obviously required, since they're often confused and overlapped. Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 17:28, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

The problem is that I'm not certain there was ever a straightforward division in the iconography. That is, I don't think every left wedjat eye represented the Eye of Horus and every right wedjat eye was the Eye of Ra. Some Egyptian texts describe the right eye of the sky deity as the sun and the left eye as the moon, but according to Krauss 2002, all the texts that say so date to the New Kingdom or later. The wedjat symbol is a thousand years older than that. There simply isn't a tidy distinction here, as is so often the case with Egyptian mythology.
The absence of that tidy distinction seems to be implied by Darnell 1997, which talks about the interchangeability of the two concepts, and Andrews 1994 notes that in amulets, "curiously enough, both right eye and left eye can be represented". The amulet from Tutankhamun's tomb, which you got Commons to rename on the grounds that the name was an "obvious error", is frequently referred to by Egyptologists as an Eye of Horus amulet, but never as an Eye of Ra. E.g., Zahi Hawass's book Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb, says it is "in the shape of a wedjat, the eye of Horus", and describes the mythology of Horus and Set before saying "the right, undamaged eye was associated with the sun. This pectoral represents the right eye, and therefore can be understood to have solar connotations." In contrast, I've never seen the sources refer to this amulet as an "Eye of Ra".
Finally, while the goddess Wadjet can sometimes represent the Eye of Ra (like many other deities), no source that I'm aware of claims that she originated as a personification of the eye. This claim needs to be removed. A. Parrot (talk) 04:10, 17 June 2023 (UTC)
Since you cite Darnell 1997 and Zahi Hawass's book, note that, as quoted from the article itself:
The Egyptians often referred to the sun and the moon as the "eyes" of particular gods. The right eye [...], for instance, was equated with the sun, and [the] left eye equated with the moon. At times the Egyptians called the lunar eye the "Eye of Horus" and called the solar eye the "Eye of Ra"—Ra being the preeminent sun god in ancient Egyptian religion. Both eyes were represented by the wedjat symbol, a stylized human eye with the facial markings of the falcon [...]. The Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson believes the two Eyes [...] gradually became distinguished as the lunar Eye of Horus and the solar Eye of Ra;
making clear that the sun/right side was Ra and the moon/left side was Horus. Left aside that Horus and Ra were often overlapped in ancient texts too, that's why we can talk about Ra-Horakhty as a single figure (a fusion of Ra/sun/right and Horus/moon/left and who knows how many other aspects), but that's also why both Ra and Horus can represent both sides: being associated into Ra-Horakhty, they just got mixed up too many times.
The goddess Wadjet/Wedjat/Uadjet is a different topic, but her name itself is just a different spelling of wedjat/uadjet, and she has always represented not the eye in physical terms, but as an extension of Ra's power and view/control over the world. The eye is just a metaphor.
Wadjet was closely associated in ancient Egyptian religion with the Eye of Ra, a powerful protective deity. The hieroglyph for her eye is shown below; sometimes two are shown in the sky of religious images. Per-Wadjet also contained a sanctuary of Horus, the child of the sun deity who would be interpreted to represent the pharaoh.
By the way, as you cited, the paragraph goes on stating that:
however, Rolf Krauss argues that no text equates the Eyes of Horus with the sun and moon until late in Egyptian history, so the Eye of Horus must have originally had some other significance.
As Krauss noted, the wedjat didn't just represent sun and moon, but aspects of the gods. This is not a theory of his, but a proven fact. But does this contradict the Ra/sun/right—Horus/moon/left symbology? No, these concepts evidently coexisted for at least four millennia, suffice to get mixed up and fused into Ra-Horakhty, who kept being also called simply Ra or Horus. Greetings, Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 19:31, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
I'm saying that just because a visual depiction of an eye is a left or right eye, that does not mean you can assume it is the Eye of Horus or Eye of Ra. We have to go with what the sources say, not on what seems to make sense to us personally. The sources call the Tutankhamun amulet an Eye of Horus. Similarly, in the case of Wadjet, she was one of many, many goddesses who could be equated with the Eye of Ra, but the wording you inserted implies that she is even more closely connected with the Eye of Ra than those other goddesses, but to my knowledge, there is no source that makes such a claim. A. Parrot (talk) 05:17, 25 June 2023 (UTC)
@A. Parrot: I didn't use any comparative term when I talked about Wedjat, she was not more nor less than any other goddess; probably, Wedjat was not even an actual goddess, but just an epithet for other feminine counterparts of Ra, e.g. Isis, like many sources suggest. Maybe you didn't study hieroglyphs, I don't want to guess, but her name and the eye symbol have always been written identically. Regarding the visual depiction of the the wedjat, based on combined sources, we may assume it. Regarding the wedjat amulet you refer to as "Eye of Horus": that name has sometimes been used as a generic synonym of wedjat by contemporary archeologists, but no ancient Egyptian text calls that amulet "Eye of Horus". Right eye hieroglyphs have never been called Eye of Horus by hieroglyph experts. The hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus, called D10, was exclusively a left eye. Check Gardiner's sign list and List of Egyptian hieroglyphs § D.  Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 22:27, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
Post scriptum: I forgot to mention that according to sources Tutankhamun did own at least one Eye of Horus amulet – but that's a different amulet, a left eye (e.g. File:Tutankhamun pendant with Wadjet.jpg) – as well as an amulet displaying both eyes, that sources simply call wedjat, not Eye of Horus. Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 22:44, 27 June 2023 (UTC)