The Souls of Pe and Nekhen, mentioned first in the

Pyramid Texts The Pyramid Texts are the oldest ancient Egyptian funerary texts, dating to the late Old Kingdom. They are the earliest known corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts. Written in Old Egyptian, the pyramid texts were carved onto the subterranea ...

, refer to the ancestors of the ancient Egyptian kings.

Nekhen Nekhen ( egy, nḫn, ); in grc, Ἱεράκων πόλις Hierakonpolis ( either: City of the Hawk, or City of the Falcon, a reference to Horus or ''Hierakōn polis'' "Hawk City" in arz, الكوم الأحمر, el-Kōm el-Aḥmar, lit=the ...

(Greek Hierakonpolis) was the Upper Egyptian centre of the worship of the god

Horus Horus or Heru, Hor, Har in Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as god of kingship and the sky. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the P ...

, whose successors the Egyptian pharaohs were thought to be. Pe (Greek Buto) was a Lower Egyptian town, not known for its Horus worship, but Ra had awarded the town to Horus after his eye was injured in the struggle for the throne of Egypt. The approbation of their predecessors, even as mythological and nameless as the ''Souls of Pe and Nekhen'', was important to the Egyptian kings, who referred to them in many inscriptions. Even the Kushite pharaohs saw themselves as descendants of the Souls of Pe and Nekhen. It appears that the ''Souls of Heliopolis'' comprised the Souls of Pe and Nekhen.Frankfort, ''op.cit.'', p.94 The followers of Horus in ancient Egyptian is "''Shemsu-Her''".

References

* Henri A. Frankfort,'' Kingship and the Gods'', University of Chicago Press 1978 * László Török, ''The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization'', Brill 1997 * George Hart, ''The Routledge Dictionary Of Egyptian Gods And Goddesses'', Routledge 2005

Footnotes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Souls Of Pe And Nekhen Groups of Egyptian deities