page_title: Sopdet
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Sopdet / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Ivory label with serekh of king Hor-Djer (1st dynasty) and a bull, formerly believed to be an image of Sirius (Spdt) and evidence of early use of the schematic civil calendar.
context_page_description: Sopdet is the ancient Egyptian name of the star Sirius and its personification as an Egyptian goddess. Known to the Greeks as Sothis, she was conflated with Isis as a goddess and Anubis as a god.
context_section_description: During the early period of Egyptian civilization, the heliacal rising of the bright star preceded the usual annual flooding of the Nile. It was therefore apparently used for the solar civil calendar which largely superseded the original lunar calendar in the 3rd millennium BC. Despite the wandering nature of the Egyptian calendar, the erratic timing of the flood from year to year, and the slow procession of Sirius within the solar year, Sopdet continued to remain central to cultural depictions of the year and to celebrations of Wep Renpet (Wp Rnpt), the Egyptian New Year. She was also venerated as a goddess of the fertility brought to the soil by the flooding.
  She was long thought to be represented by the cow on an ivory tablet from the reign of Djer (Dynasty I), but this is no longer supported by most Egyptologists. During the Old Kingdom, she was an important goddess of the annual flood and a psychopomp guiding deceased pharaohs through the Egyptian underworld. During the Middle Kingdom, she was primarily a mother and nurse and, by the Ptolemaic period, she was almost entirely subsumed into Isis.
caption: The tablet's engravings were believed to discuss the bull-formed Sopdet.
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