Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 99. (Budapest, 2003)

LIPTAY, ÉVA: Between Heaven and Earth. The Motif of the Cow Coming out of the Mountain

The final scene discussed above is separated by a two-columned inscription from the preceding one (fig. 4), which is focused on a s/ira-scepter with a sun disc and two uraei upon it. The panel apparently rhymes with the parallel scene on the opposite side, where the shm-sceptre itself is just being handed over to the deceased by a priest performing the lunerary rite. Here, however, the same meaning has been conveyed by a more abstract constellation: the power needed for ruling and resurrecting in the afterlife appears in a personified form. In the end, the deceased becomes unified and identical with Osiris, ruler of the Netherworld. As the cobras hanging from the sun disc wear the crown of Upper Egypt, the protective female principle manifests herself in figures of the vulture goddess of the South on both sides of the large shm-sceptre. According to the testimony of the complementary signs, the two vulture-hieroglyphs carry the phonetic value of their names {nhb.t I nhb.t Stj.t), just as we saw in the case of the cobras on the opposite side. The vultures are standing again on the regular hieroglyphs nwb and the "lower sky", while each of them is fronted by an c

nh-s\gn. The lowermost register of the scene is occupied by sequences of t.t- and űW-signs. I, THE COW COMING OUT OF THE MOUNTAIN. MIDDLE AND NEW KINGDOM ANTECEDENTS. The first pictorial representations of the idea behind this particular motif can be found on the vignettes to Chapter 186 of the New Kingdom versions of the Book of the Dead. The scene is a desert-edge hillside, from the gorge of which the cow-shaped goddess wearing the Hathor-headdress (i.e. the sun disc between the horns with a pair of long feathers) „comes out to the light". The hinder part of her body is usually hidden in the mountain, but some versions depict her wading in a papyrus brush with her forelegs (fig. 5). 5. The vignette of BD 186 from the Papyrus of Ani