Seven Hundred Faces of Appeasement: Sekhmet's Statues at Karnak

Sekhmet was venerated in antiquity, though the record shows no unbroken continuous cult, and the concrete form that standing took is unmistakable in the surviving archaeological record. The pharaoh Amenhotep III commissioned several hundred statues of Sekhmet, seated and standing, most carved from black granodiorite, for the precinct of the goddess Mut at Karnak, part of a building program that scholars connect to a period of pestilence or unrest during his reign, an act of ritual appeasement on a scale unmatched by any other Egyptian deity's surviving statuary. The number is large enough, plausibly one for each day of the year, that no comparable cult object survives from ancient Egypt in anything like the same quantity for a single deity. Centuries of later reuse, plundering and export scattered the statues far beyond their original setting; examples now stand in museum collections on every continent, from Cairo to New York to London, each one a discrete surviving instance of the same defensive religious logic: Sekhmet was sent out by Ra to punish humanity and had to be managed rather than simply worshipped in comfort.