Shai
| Shai in hieroglyphics | |||||||
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Shai |
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| transcription | Š3j | ||||||
Schai , also Schaj , Schay or Shai is an ancient Egyptian god of fate who has been represented as a snake since the 18th dynasty .
Surname
The name Schai is in Greek Psais or Psois . In Egyptian , this is derived from the root word Š3 , which means to determine, whereby the name can be translated with determination.
presentation
Compared to other gods of Egyptian mythology , depictions of the god Shai are found quite rarely in Egyptian art . He is mainly depicted as a snake, but there are also images on dead papyri of the New Kingdom that show him as an anthropomorphic deity.
meaning
Since the New Kingdom, Shai has been the embodiment of fate-determining values such as happiness, prosperity and life in the Egyptian religion , which were assigned to a person at birth. He effected a person's personal well-being. Because of this meaning, he could be invoked both as an idea of destiny and as God personified. This is indicated, for example, by inscriptions from the reign of Akhenaten , in which it sometimes says in relation to the sun god Aton : “Shai, who gives life.” At times, Shai is named as a personified god together with Meschenet or Renenutet , who with him the meaning of Shared destiny.
Both in the late period and in the Greco-Roman period , Shai became the primordial and protective god who was an independently acting being. An equation with the Agathos Daimon (Agathodaimon), who was a god of fortune-telling, took place in Ptolemaic times.
cult
There was no extensive cult for this god. Rather, the few surviving representations and texts indicate that Shai was seen as an abstract personification of destiny or fate.
See also
literature
- Hans Bonnet : Lexicon of the Egyptian religious history. 3rd, unchanged edition, Nikol, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-937872-08-6 , pp. 671-674.
- Siegfried Morenz : Investigations on the role of fate in the Egyptian religion (= treatises of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. Philological-historical class. [ASAW Phil.-Hist. Kl.] 52, 1). Berlin 1960.
- Richard H. Wilkinson : The world of the gods in ancient Egypt: Faith - Power - Mythology. Theiss, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-8062-1819-6 , p. 128.