Khonsu, the Moon god

This site carries his name, so he comes first. Khonsu was the Moon of ancient Egypt, and he was not always a gentle one.

A blade in the oldest texts

Around 2350 BCE, the burial chamber of Unis, last king of the Fifth Dynasty, was covered with spells meant to carry the king’s spirit up to the sky. They are the oldest body of Egyptian religious writing that has come down to us.¹ One of them, nicknamed the “Cannibal Hymn”, shows the dead king feeding on the power of the gods. In it, a figure called Courser, “the lords’ knife-bearer”, slits their throats for Unis.²

The Egyptologist James P. Allen, who translated these spells, explains that the word named the crescent Moon, seen as a knife in the sky, and that from the Middle Kingdom onwards the Moon itself was the god Khonsu.³ The name says what the Moon does: it runs across the night.

A god of Thebes

By the New Kingdom, Khonsu had a home: Thebes, today’s Luxor. There he was worshipped with Amun and Mut, the Theban triad. On the south wall of the great hypostyle hall at Karnak, Ramesses II presents rows of prisoners to the three gods together.⁴ Under Ramesses III a temple of Khonsu rose at Karnak, and the kings after him kept adding to it.⁵

People also carried him with them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art keeps a gold pendant of Khonsu less than four centimetres tall, made around 1300–1080 BCE,⁶ and a gold amulet of him from the centuries that followed.⁷

The healer of the Bentresh stela

The best-known story about Khonsu was carved on a stela found beside his temple at Karnak.⁸ It tells how the prince of a distant land, Bekhten, asked Ramesses II for help: his daughter Bentresh, the queen’s younger sister, was ill. A royal scribe sent from Egypt found her in the grip of a spirit, and the prince asked for the god himself. So the king turned to Khonsu-in-Thebes, who agreed to send another form of himself, Khonsu-the-Plan-Maker, “smiting the evil spirits”. The statue travelled for a year and five months. When it arrived, the princess was well at once, and the spirit agreed to leave after a feast held in its honour.

The prince could not bear to give the god back. He kept him for more than three years, until he dreamt of a golden hawk leaving its shrine and flying towards Egypt. Frightened, he sent the god home loaded with gifts.⁹

It reads like a royal record. It is not one. As Adolf Erman first noticed, and as James Henry Breasted explained when he published the stela in 1906, it was written eight or nine hundred years after Ramesses II, in Persian or early Greek times, by priests of Khonsu who wanted to add to their god’s glory. They even gave the king the titles of another pharaoh.¹⁰

What remains

From the knife of the oldest pyramid to the healer of a foreign princess, the Moon god changed with the people who prayed to him. The image underneath stayed the same: something that crosses the night, disappears, and always comes back.