A triad containing two goddesses produced no legitimate offspring, and was unsatisfactory to a people who regarded the lack of progeny as a curse from heaven; one in which the presence of a son promised to ensure the perpetuity of the race was more in keeping with the idea of a blessed and prosperous family, as that of gods should be. Triads of the former kind were therefore almost everywhere broken up into two new triads, each containing a divine father, a divine mother, and a divine son. Two fruitful households arose from the barren union of Thot with Safkhîtâbûi and Nahmâûît: one composed of Thot, Safkhîtâbûi, and Harnûbi, the golden sparrow-hawk;[***] into the other Nahmâûît and her nursling Nofirhorû entered.
*** This somewhat rare triad, noted by Wilkinson, is
sculptured on the wall of a chamber in the Tûrah quarries.
3 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bronze statuette incrusted
with gold, in the Gîzeh Museum.
The persons united with the old feudal divinities in order to form triads were not all of the same class. Goddesses, especially, were made to order, and might often be described as grammatical, so obvious is the linguistic device to which they owe their being. From Râ, Amon, Horus, Sobkû, female Ras, Anions, Horuses, and Sobkûs were derived, by the addition of the regular feminine affix to the primitive masculine names—Râît, Amonît, Horît, Sobkît.[*] In the same way, detached cognomens of divine fathers were embodied in divine sons. Imhotpû, "he who comes in peace," was merely one of the epithets of Phtah before he became incarnate as the third member of the Memphite triad.[**] In other cases, alliances were contracted between divinities of ancient stock, but natives of different nomes, as in the case of Isis of Bûto and the Mendesian Osiris; of Haroêris of Edfu and Hâthor of Denderah.
* Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie
Égyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 7, 8, 256.
** Imhotpû, the Imouthes of the Greeks, and by them
identified with Æsculapius, was discovered by Salt, and his
name was first translated as he who comes with offering.
The translation, he who comes in peace, proposed by E. de
Rougé, is now universally adopted. Imhotpû did not take form
until the time of the New Empire; his great popularity at
Memphis and throughout Egypt dates from the Saïte and Greek
periods.
In the same manner Sokhît of Letopolis and Bastît of Bubastis were appropriated as wives to Phtah of Memphis, Nofirtûmû being represented as his son by both unions.[*] These improvised connections were generally determined by considerations of vicinity; the gods of conterminous principalities were married as the children of kings of two adjoining kingdoms are married, to form or to consolidate relations, and to establish bonds of kinship between rival powers whose unremitting hostility would mean the swift ruin of entire peoples.
The system of triads, begun in primitive times and con-, tinned unbrokenly up to the last days of Egyptian polytheism, far from in any way lowering the prestige of the feudal gods, was rather the means of enhancing it in the eyes of the multitude. Powerful lords as the new-comers might be at home, it was only in the strength of an auxiliary title that they could enter a strange city, and then only on condition of submitting to its religious law. Hâthor, supreme at Denderah, shrank into insignificance before Haroêris at Edfû, and there retained only the somewhat subordinate part of a wife in the house of her husband.[**]
* Originally, Nofirtûmû appears to have been the son of cat
or lioness-headed goddesses, Bastît and Sokhît, and from
them he may have inherited the lion's head with which he is
often represented. His name shows him to have been in the
first place an incarnation of Atûmû, but he was affiliated
to the god Phtah of Memphis when that god became the husband
of his mothers, and preceded Imhotpû as the third personage
in the oldest Memphite triad.
** Each year, and at a certain time, the goddess came in
high state to spend a few days in the great temple of Edfû,
with her husband Haroêris.