Meretseger

On the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, where the sun sets behind the desert hills, a pyramid-shaped mountain rises above the hidden cleft of the Valley of the Kings, the dry ravine where the New Kingdom pharaohs buried their dead. The Egyptians called the peak Dehenet Imentet, the Peak of the West, for the west was the land of the dead, the realm of the setting sun. They believed the mountain itself was divine, a natural pyramid standing guard over the man-made tombs beneath it, and the goddess who embodied it was Meretseger, She Who Loves Silence: the silence of the tomb, the silence of the cliffs, the silence that falls when the workmen go home and the valley is left to the wind and the snakes. She was shown as a rearing cobra, or a cobra with the head of a woman, or a woman with the head of a snake, sometimes wearing the horned sun disk of Hathor, the golden sky-goddess who shared the western mountain with her.

Her people were the tomb-builders of Deir el-Medina, a walled village in a barren valley behind the mountain, home for some four hundred and fifty years to the stonemasons, sculptors, and painters who hollowed out and decorated the royal tombs. They called themselves the Servants in the Place of Truth, and they were the elite of Egyptian labourers, literate, well provisioned, and proud. Each working week they climbed the steep path over the mountain to the Valley of the Kings, and along that path they set up small rock shrines and carved stelae, inscribed stones of prayer and thanks, to the goddess who owned the mountain they crossed. She watched them from the peak as they worked in the royal darkness. They feared her and they loved her, and in their letters and laundry lists, their lawsuits and love songs, they called her simply the Peak, as if she were family.

For Meretseger was the guardian of the necropolis, and her justice was as swift as a cobra's strike. The wadis around the village were home to real vipers and cobras, and the workmen believed that a snakebite on the mountain was no accident but a sentence. She punished the oath-breaker who swore falsely by her name, the thief who laid hands on the royal tombs, the liar, the adulterer. Blindness, sickness, and venom were her weapons, and the people of Deir el-Medina did not doubt her reach. Yet when the New Kingdom weakened and the great tomb robberies finally came, even her mountain could not keep out greed: the surviving trial records show the villagers of the Place of Truth standing in the dock beside the very thieves they had once sung against.

But the goddess who struck could also heal, and the most moving testimony to any Egyptian god survives on her stelae. A workman named Neferabu set up a stone at her shrine confessing that he had been an ignorant and foolish man who had offended the Peak, and that she had struck him down with sickness. In his despair he called on her, and, in his own words, she came to him as a sweet breeze; she saw his repentance, she forgave him, and the sickness departed from his body. His hymn ends with a warning and a promise to everyone who reads it: beware of the Peak, for a lion lies within her, yet she is merciful to all who call upon her. Such personal penitence, a common man confessing his sin and naming the very moment of forgiveness, is among the rarest and most precious voices in all Egyptian religion.

Meretseger belonged to her mountain, and when the mountain's work ended, so did she. Around 1070 BCE, at the close of the New Kingdom, the royal burials ceased, the court moved north to the Delta, and the village of the tomb-builders was abandoned, its people scattered, its shrines left to the sand. Isis and Osiris travelled to Rome and beyond, but Meretseger never left Thebes, and her name vanished with her valley. Three thousand years later, when excavators uncovered the village and its shrines, her stelae began to speak again. The peak itself, which the Arabs call el-Qurn, the Horn, still stands guard over the valley of the tombs, as silent and watchful as the day the first workman looked up at the mountain and called it a goddess.