Nekhbet

Nekhbet belonged to the valley, and her city was Nekheb, the town the Greeks later called Eileithyiaspolis and the modern world calls el-Kab, a settlement on the eastern bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, just across the river from Nekhen, the ancient city of the falcon god Horus. Her name meant simply She of Nekheb, and she was the white vulture, the huge scavenger bird that wheeled over the valley cliffs on motionless wings. From the very beginning of Egyptian history she was the protector of the southern kingdom and its kings, and the tall White Crown of Upper Egypt was believed to be hers, the emblem of the land over which she soared. Where the Delta goddess Wadjet struck like a serpent, Nekhbet covered like a wing.

When the two lands of Egypt were joined into one kingdom, around 3100 BCE, Nekhbet took her place beside Wadjet as one of the Two Ladies, the twin divine patrons of the united realm. Every pharaoh thereafter carried their names in his own titulary: the Nebty name, the second of the five great royal titles, proclaimed that the king ruled by the grace of both goddesses, vulture and cobra, valley and Delta. On the brow of the king the two powers sat side by side, and in the art of the temples Nekhbet soars above the pharaoh in battle and in ceremony, her vast wings spread from horizon to horizon, her claws gripping the shen ring, the looped symbol of eternity, which she holds over his head like a promise that his reign will never end. No image of Egyptian kingship was complete without her shadow.

To the Egyptians, the vulture was the perfect mother. They believed that every vulture was female and that the birds conceived their young by the wind alone, which made the vulture the purest image of motherhood in nature, a mother who owed her children to no one but the sky. Nekhbet was therefore the divine mother of the pharaoh, the Mother of Mothers, who spread her wings around the king as a vulture spreads them around her chick, and who suckled him with the milk of eternity. In the Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious writings in the world, she embraces the dead king and lifts him up to the heavens in her wings. This mothering power made her a goddess of childbirth as well as kingship, and women of her city prayed to her at the birth of their children, for the goddess who guarded the birth of kings could guard the birth of farmers' sons too.

Nekhbet's protection reached beyond the cradle and the battlefield into the grave. The vulture who lifted the king's soul to heaven also spread her wings over the dead, and the queens and royal women of Egypt wore a headdress shaped like her, a vulture whose wings swept down around the wearer's cheeks and whose head reared at the brow, marking every royal wife and mother as a daughter of the goddess. Over the long centuries her identity flowed into that of Mut, the great vulture goddess of Thebes, the consort of Amun, the king of the gods, until the two were spoken of almost as one. Yet Nekheb remained her own, and her temple among the cliffs drew worshippers from the earliest dynasties down to the age of the Ptolemies, who rebuilt her sanctuary in stone and carved their Greek names in her honour, calling her Eileithyia, their goddess of childbirth.

Nekhbet outlasted the kingdom that crowned her. Her city dwindled to a ruin in the desert cliffs, but her image went wherever the idea of Egypt went: the vulture with the spread wings became one of the most copied motifs of the ancient world, soaring over temple doorways, palace ceilings, and royal thrones from the Delta to the cataracts. When the tomb of Tutankhamun was opened in the twentieth century, the world saw her again exactly as the Egyptians had known her, for on the brow of the boy king's golden death mask two goddesses still sat side by side, the cobra Wadjet and the vulture Nekhbet, the Two Ladies, guarding the dead child-king into eternity. Of all the gods of Egypt, none held so closely to the crown, or for so long.