Coffin Text hymn from Sp 484:

I have come that I might kiss the earth, that
I might worship my mistress, for I have seen her beauty,
I will give praise to Hathor, for I have seen her beauty.
I will give her the fabric, for her form is more distinguished than the gods,
I will see her beauty, for she makes my beautiful going.

The name of this netjert describes her in relation to the god Heru: Mansion of Horus is how her name translates literally, her sign corresponding to a falcon in a house. In earlier times, Hathor was the lady of the sky, the sky goddess regarded as the mother of the sun-god Horus, or daughter of the god Re, until Isis replaced her. The concept of the sky as a cow, which was widespread in the Delta, causes Hathor to be shown in bovine form. However, it is unclear if Predynastic worship belonged to Hathor or to Bat, another likely candidate for the cow-heads shown on the Narmer palette dated from about 3000 BCE.

If this was Het-hert shown on the palette, her full-face depiction there and on the pillars of her temples, especially at Denderah, broke the normal conventions of Egyptian art, which decreed that the human head should be shown only in profile. She in fact is the only goddess ever shown full-face in reliefs.

Usually the deity was shown in human form wearing on her head the sun-disc flanked by a cow’s horns. According to an ancient myth Hathor was supposed to have raised the youthful sun up to heaven by means of her horns. Eventually the goddess who bore the sun, was herself equated with the sun, being regarded as the solar Eye of Re. She is so called this in Utterance 405 of the Pyramid Texts. The Palermo Stone records that statues were dedicated to her and land was endowed for her temples before the 5th Dynasty ended.

The Myth of the Destruction of Humanity, which is the first part of The Book of the Divine Cow, inscribed near the celestial cow in the tomb of Seti I, related on the largest of the four great shrines of gilded wood protecting the sarcophagus of King Tut, and the tombs of Ramesses II, III and VI, dates from the Middle Kingdom. It relates that, as the Eye of the creator-sun-god, Hathor once was summoned by him to destroy mankind as punishment for plotting against Re. Taking the form of the lioness Sekhmet, She who Prevails, Hathor raged through mankind, destroying all in her path. Re became alarmed when Hathor/Sekhmet did not heed his order to cease the destruction. Re had to have brewed a special beer colored red with ochre, to resemble blood, and had the liquid poured over the land in Hathor’s path. Hathor drank deeply when she found the beer, and became so drunk she forgot all about destroying mankind.

In the cycle of stories recounting the struggles between Horus and Seth, when Seth gouged out the eyes of Horus, Hathor found the god, and using gazelle’s milk, healed him and replaced his eyes.

In the paintings inside temples and tombs of the later New Kingdom period, Hathor is often depicted wearing a patterned red dress and a long narrow red scarf, tightly tied around the neck and left hanging down the back. This manner of dress may have identified priestess of Hathor during the Old Kingdom. An inscription at the temple of Edfu gives her the title Mistress of the Red Cloth.

The most popular concept of Hathor was not an angry, vengeful deity, only pacified when drunk, but rather a beautiful young woman who brought joy and happiness to mankind and the gods. In the Contending of Horus and Seth it is recounted how Re, having been insulted by a lesser god, retired to sulk. Hathor came and stood before him and uncovered her private parts before his face. This act apparently cheered Re up so much he laughed and rejoined the Divine Company. This and the earlier story in the Book of the Divine Cow shows the two-sided nature of Hathor, the one that could attract with her brilliant warmth and sexual allure, and the other that could turn on transgressors with the full ferocity of a lioness (or a belligerent cow).

In the Old Kingdom, the valley temple at Giza of King Khafre of the 4th Dynasty was placed under the protection of Hathor in its southern sector. Dendera was also already Hathor’s cult center at that time, and this was reinforced later by the Ptolemaic temple dedicated to her was built there. Hathor could also be represented as a lioness, as a snake who laughs with Wadjet, or a sycamore. The papyrus plant was sacred to her since the habitat of wild cattle was in the swamps by the Nile. The sculptured images of the queen and goddess in Menkaure’s pyramid complex are similar, and the golden armchair of Queen Hetepheres, Khufu’s mother, show clusters of papyrus as arm decoration, placing the queen between these clumps, just as the cow of Hathor was represented.

She was especially revered by women as the goddess of love and beauty, looking after the interests of unmarried girls, and as a fertility goddess, protecting pregnant women and helping them in their labor, aided by her son Ihy and the dwarf-god Bes. Hathor was also the royal nurse, suckling the adult king in her bovine form.

The Seven Hathors were a group of goddesses, all forms of Hathor, who had the power to foretell the fate of a new-born child and to bestow gifts upon it. They are found in such stories as the Tale of the Two Brothers and The Doomed Prince. They each had a name, listed either this way: Lady of the universe, Sky-storm, You From the land of silence, You From Khemmis, Red-hair, Bright red, and Your name flourishes through skill, or alternatively: Lady of the House of Jubilation; Mistresses of the west (2 and 3); Mistresses of the east (4 and 5); and Ladies of the sacred land (6 and 7).

Hathor was connected to the Pharaoh since the Old Kingdom at least. She, rather than Isis, may have been the original mother of Horus in the cycle where Horus and Seth were brothers. When the Horus legends were absorbed into the Osiris myth, Horus then became the son of Isis. With Hathor as the mother of Horus, Horus being the god-king, Hathor was also the mother of the king. The finest representation of this relationship can be seen in one of the triad sculptures from Menkaure’s 4th Dynasty temple at Giza: the king is flanked by a local nome goddess with a cow-standard, and on the other side, his hand is protectively held by Hathor. In two reliefs from Hatshepsut’s 18th Dynasty Deir-el-Bahari Hathor chapel, Hathor in her bovine form lovingly licks the hand of the enthroned king and suckles the king.

Several depictions of Pharaoh with Hathor also show the ruler encircled by Her sacred menat necklace. This necklace ensured the King’s rebirth after death. The frequent representations of Hathor holding out her menat to the King has been interpreted as “symbolic of the ability of the king to compel all lands to serve him through either the emanation of his attraction or his terrorizing qualities.”

In Thebes, Hathor was worshipped as a mortuary goddess in the guise of Mehet-weret, The Great Flood. She was known as lady of the West or of the western mountain. Each evening she was considered to receive the setting sun, which she then protected until morning. The dying person wished also to be ‘in the following of Hathor’, and therefore also receive her protection in the netherworld from the powers of darkness.

Temples to Hathor were built in many places in Egypt. One of the oldest centers was the town called Diospolis Parva by the Greeks, the capital of the 7th Upper Egyptian Nome. The local temple of Hathor, called the Hwt Sekhem or Mansion of the Sistrum, gave its name to the entire town. By the Coptic Period this had been shortened to Hoo, today known as Hiw. At Gebelein, a temple to Hathor first built in the 3rd Dynasty was still functioning in Graeco-Roman times. The island of Philae, with its famous temple to Isis, also had a small Hathor temple. But the most famous temple to Hathor was at Denderah, or Iunet, dedicated to the triad of Hathor, Horus of Edfu and their son, Harsomtus. The predynastic temple of Hathor was rebuilt in the 4th Dynasty by Khufu and dedicated to Hathor, Lady of the Pillar, and to her son Ihy. It was enlarged, refurbished and embellished by Mentuhotep III of the 11th Dynasty and Thutmose III of the 18th Dynasty.

Hathor was also most often associated with the desert and with foreign countries. She was called lady of Byblos and at the Turquoise mines of Sinai a temple was built to her as the lady of turquoise (and also thus of faience as well).