The god of the Theban nome
Montu was a god of the Theban nome, the district around Thebes. The two scholars this atlas follows spell his name in different ways. Budge writes Menthu, and in one passage of the Pyramid Texts he gives the short form Menth. Wiedemann writes Ment, and he adds the Greek form, Month. Both of them write Amen for the god this atlas calls Amun, and in Wiedemann’s account the two gods stand side by side at Thebes.
Ment, Greek Month, ranked next in importance to Amen among the chief gods of the Theban nome. Here he was worshipped in a great temple near Karnak, in Medamot, in Taud, and in Erment on the opposite bank, in fact in so many places as to suggest the idea that he was the true god of the nome and had preceded Amen in that capacity — Alfred Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians (1897), p. 125
Wiedemann’s argument rests on the number of places. Karnak was the great temple city of Amun, and Montu had a great temple near it. He had temples at Medamot and at Taud as well, and at Erment across the river. A god with so many temples in one district, Wiedemann thinks, was probably its god before Amun came. He then offers a second and more careful idea: the two gods may once have been one god who later became two. Budge makes a similar point in his own way. He calls Montu probably an old local god, and he says that the cult of Montu was so important that the priests of Amun had to incorporate him with the great god of Thebes.
Budge also gives the cult a centre. Montu was commonly described as lord of Thebes, he says, but the chief seat of his worship was at Hermonthis, the town that Wiedemann calls Erment. Wiedemann names the god’s wife by the place. At Taud she was Anit or Hathor. At Erment a different goddess was recognized as his wife.
Of the origin and early history of Montu, Budge says, nothing is known. But a royal text in the Pyramid Texts names him among a number of ancient gods, and it says that the dead king has gone forth as Menth. From this passage Budge concludes that the worship of Montu was widespread even in the Sixth Dynasty, that he was a great god, and that the dead king hoped to resemble him in the Underworld. The Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead names him only twice, and each time only in a list of gods.
A hawk-headed god of war
Budge describes how Montu was usually shown. He was a man with the head of a hawk, and on that head he wore a crown formed of the solar disk with the uraeus and two high plumes. In this form, Budge says, he was styled “lord of Thebes”. One figure that Budge takes from Lanzone gives him two hawks’ heads, each with its own disk, two uraei and two plumes. Wiedemann describes the god more briefly, as hawk headed and with the headdress of Amun.
The weapons show what kind of god he was. In the figure from Lanzone, Montu grasps the scimitar in his right hand, and Budge says that the scimitar shows him to be a god of war. In another scene that Budge cites, he holds a long spear with a bronze or iron head, and he spears a foe whose hands and feet are tied together. Wiedemann states the warlike character of the god directly, and then he takes it into the sky.
Ment was emphatically a god of war, fighting with the Egyptian army in their battles, and granting might and victory to the king. In later times he was often combined with the Sun god as Ment Ra, and as such he stands in the prow of the solar bark armed with a lance and ready to pierce the enemies who oppose the progress of the Sun — Alfred Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians (1897), p. 125
The passage gives Montu two fields of battle. The first is on earth. He fights with the Egyptian army, and he gives the king might and victory. The second is the path of the sun. Joined with the sun-god as Ment Ra, he stands at the front of the sun’s boat with a lance, and the enemies he waits for are the enemies of the sun. The weapon changes from the scimitar and the spear to the lance, but the work stays the same. Budge reads the solar side of the god in a similar way. He calls Montu an important form of the sun-god, and he thinks that the god was a personification of the destructive heat of the sun.
The king who rages like Montu
In the older texts, Wiedemann says, Montu appears chiefly in figures of speech about the king. The king is said to be as brave as Montu, or to have conquered his foes like Montu. Wiedemann adds that such phrases give no data on the nature or the cult of the god. But they show how the Egyptians used him. Montu was the measure of a king in battle.
Budge gives the fullest example, from the narrative of the battle of Kadesh. In his summary, Rameses II “rose up as Ra riseth, and took the weapons” of Montu, whom the narrative calls father. The narrative then comes to the moment when the king saw the enemy before him.
he raged at them like Menthu, lord of Thebes, and took his weapons in his hand — E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. 2, p. 27
The narrative uses the god twice. First the king takes up the weapons of Montu. Then he rages like Montu himself, and again he takes weapons in his hand. The god gives the king his arms and also his anger. The epithet in the line, “lord of Thebes”, is the title that Budge gives to the hawk-headed form, and it ties the battle to the city of the god. In the rest of Budge’s summary the king leaps into his chariot and drives headlong into the battle, and there, Budge adds, he of course wins a great victory.
Wiedemann adds one more comparison. As the Egyptian war-god, he says, Montu is sometimes set against the Semitic Baal, and the combined might of Montu and Baal, when it was granted to a king, was held to be the very height of strength.
The raging bull and Menthu-Ra
Budge notes that elsewhere the texts often call Montu a mighty bull, and from this he makes a guess about what the god was at first.
it is possible that originally this god was nothing but a personification of the strength and might of the raging bull when fighting a foe, and that his worship in one form or another existed in predynastic times. It must, in any case, be very ancient, because when joined to Ra his name comes first in the compound name and we have “Menthu-Ra” instead of Ra-Menthu — E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. 2, p. 27
Budge gives two arguments here, and they are of different kinds. The first is a guess about the nature of the god. At the start, Budge suggests, Montu may have been nothing more than the strength of a bull in a fight. The second argument is about the order of names. When Montu was joined to Ra, his name came first, and Budge takes this as a sign of great age. The compound “Menthu-Ra” is the reason this atlas records Montu as identified with Ra.
Wiedemann’s evidence for the bull comes from the cult. At Erment, he says, the sacred animal of the god was a bull, Bakh, whom the classical writers called Bacis. He thinks that the title of strong bull, which the kings of the Theban dynasties bore, was probably borrowed from this animal. The texts call Bacis the living soul of Ra, that is, an incarnation of Ra, and Wiedemann draws a date from this: when the bull first got that name, Montu and Ra had already been joined. Wiedemann thinks that the bull must have been worshipped at Taud too, and there Montu was shown with his usual headdress but with the head and horns of a bull.
Budge describes a fuller bull form at Tchert. In that city Montu was a man with the head of a bull, and instead of the solar disk he wore the lunar crescent and disk, sometimes with plumes and sometimes without. He held a bow and arrows, a club and a knife. Budge reads this local form too as the fierce heat of the sun, which fought the enemies of the sun-god and killed them with burning rays like spears.
The cult of the god outlived the power of his city. When Thebes lost its political and social supremacy, Wiedemann says, Erment became the capital of the district. Many inscriptions to Montu, or more exactly to Ment Ra, were then put up in temples at Karnak that had first been dedicated to Amun and his cycle. At Hermonthis Montu also absorbed another god: in his list of the places where Sobek was worshipped, Budge records that at Hermonthis Sobek was merged in Montu. The god who may have ruled Thebes before Amun thus ended with inscriptions in his name in the temples of Amun.