Egyption Moon-god.Yah

[GateKeeper]

In its earliest attestations the name Yah refers to the moon as satellite of the earth. Yah then becomes conceptualised as a lunar deity, iconographically anthropomorphic but whose manifestations, from the hieroglyphic evidence, can include the crescent of the new moon, the ibis and the falcon- comparable to the other moon deities, Thoth and Khonsu. It is probable that contact with Middle Eastern states in Palestine, Syria and Babylonia was instrumental in the development of Yah as a deity. Certainly the zenith of Yah's popularity lay in the period following the Middle Kingdom when immigration from the Levant was high and princes from Palestine, knoiwn as the Hyksos, rulers, dominated Egypt. These foreigners may well have looked for a lunardeity analogous to the Akkadian moon-god Sin who had an important temple at Harran in north Syria. Strangely, it is with the Theban royal family eventually responsible for the expulsion of these alien rulers that there is a difinite inclination for names involving the mood-god Yah. The daughter of Seqenenre Tao I (Dynasty XVII) is Yah-hotep ('Yah is content'). The founder of Dynasty XVIII was called Yahmose ('Yah is born') and the same element is in the nameo f his wife Yahmose-Nefertari. Most likely the Middle Eastern deity who gave the stimulus to the adoption of Yah is the influence behind the name Kamose, the brother of Yahmose, who began the final thrust against the Hyksos domination. Kamose ('the bull is born') might be the Egyptian equivalent of the epithet applied to Sin describing him as a 'young bull... with strong horns' (i.e. the tips of the crescent moon). This imagery would be totally compatible with the Egyptian concept of the pharaoh as an invinvible bull. In the tomb of Tuthmosis III (Dynasty XVII), the pharaoh whose campaigns took him to the banks of the Euphrates river, there is a scene where the king is accompanied by his mother and three queens, including Sit-Yah 'daughter of the moon-god'. Traces of his cult beyond this period are sporadic.

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