The Book of the Dead is made up of a number of individual Ancient Egyptian funerary texts with accompanying illustrations. They are in general written on papyrus and were used from the earliest period of the New Kingdom (c. 1550 BCE) until around 50 BCE. These texts consist of magic spells, some of which are to grant the dead person mystical knowledge in the afterlife, or to give them control over the world around them through their journey in the Duat, or underworld.[4]
Of the Book of the Dead copies that have been found, a limited number reference an obscure entity in spell 17b named "Medjed" (also spelled "Metchet"),[5] which means "The Smiter".[1][6] In an English translation of the Papyrus of Ani, Raymond O. Faulkner renders the portion of the spell referring to Medjed as follows:
I know the name of that smiter [i.e., Medjed] among them who belongs to the House of Osiris, who shoots with his eyes, yet is unseen. The sky is encircled with the fiery blast of his mouth and Hāpi makes report, yet he is unseen.[7]
Apart from this short passage, nothing is known about Medjed.[8]Hermann Grapow proposed that Medjed could refer to a star (given that Medjed is said to radiate light and to have a connection with the cyclical flooding of the Nile), but as Ilaria Cariddi notes, the name is never written with a star determinative.[9]
According to Ilaria Cariddi, visual representations of Medjed can be found on only nine papyrus scrolls, all of which date to around the time of Egypt's Twenty-first Dynasty (1077–943 BCE).[10] These scrolls (of which the Greenfield papyrus is arguably the most well-known)[8][11][12] are as follows:
In these scrolls, Medjed is depicted as a dome with eyes, supported by two human-like feet. A few scrolls also portray the deity with a red knotted belt above or below his eyes.[17] The scholars E. A. Wallis Budge, H. Milde, and Mykola Tarasenko have argued that Medjed's dome-like torso is either a shroud or a "shapeless body" that symbolizes the deity's imperceptible nature,[18][19][20] and Cariddi has proposed that Medjed's prominent eyes and legs could signify that he can "see, move and act even though humans cannot perceive him".[21] In contrast, Bernard Bruyère and Terence DuQuesne have contended that Medjed is actually a personification of an oil jar, and that his red "belt" is actually a stylized lid fastener.[21][22][23]
In the 2016 Japanese video game Persona 5, his name is used for a fictional antagonistic hacker group that describe themselves as the "true executors of justice".[31]
^Medjed is sometimes referred to as a "demon".[1] However, unlike the contemporary understanding of demons as purely malevolent supernatural entities, the term is often used by Egyptologists in reference to a variety of supernatural entities, including ghosts, evil or benevolent spirits, minor deities, representations of chaos, and even "personifications of the destructive aspects of the [major] gods".[2][3]
Andrews, Carol, ed. (1985). The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Translated by Raymond O. Faulkner (Revised ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
DuQuesne, Terence (2008). "The Great Goddess and her Companions in Middle Egypt". In Rothöhler, Benedikt; Manisali, Alexander (eds.). Mythos und Ritual: Festschrift für Jan Assmann zum 70. Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag. pp. 1–26. ISBN9783825811457.
Lucarelli, Rita (2010). "Demons (Benevolent and Malevolent)". In Wendrich, Willeke; Dieleman, Jacco; Frood, Elizabeth; Baines, John (eds.). UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. pp. 1–10. Retrieved 5 April 2023.
te Velde, Herman (1975). "Dämonen". In von Wolfgang Helck, Herausgegeben; Otto, Eberhard (eds.). Lexikon der Ägyptologie. Vol. I: A – Ernte. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 980–984.
Media related to Medjed at Wikimedia Commons
Egypt
Ancient Egypt
