SPECIFIC TRAITS OF DEIFICATION OF THE EGYPTIAN QUEENS IN THE NEW KINGDOM

The article analyzes the characteristic traits of deification of the New Kingdom queens on the basis of their official representation in Egyptian pictorial and textual sources. In order to reveal the nature of the deification of queens and the essence of their theological role in general, the article discusses specific methods and features of the queens’ assimilation with the goddesses, primarily, Hathor, Isis, Maat, Mut or the goddess of the Solar-Eye (Hathor/Tefnut). Here, the term “deification” means a queen was endowed with various features of a goddess, and two aspects of this phenomenon are distinguished: the deification of living and dead queens. The focus of the present study is only the lifetime deification. The author puts the trend to assimilate them with goddesses in a close correlation with the evolution of the royal ideology and the so-called “solarization” of the ruling king’s image, which reached its peak expression under Amenhotep III and Ramses II (the period of Akhenaten’s reign, which deserves a special study, is out of scope). The bulk of the evidence is provided by individual iconography of several queens. The study of the available selection of sources allows to draw a fundamental conclusion that there undoubtedly were various semantic parallels between the queens’ images and the principal goddesses of the pantheon. Nevertheless, the assimilation of queens with the goddesses, with some exceptions, did not reach the level of complete identification with the latter, and these parallels themselves were drawn mainly by the means of iconography rather than phraseology. © 2023, Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.