Iconography

In most of her representations Nut was depicted in anthropomorphic form (often as a goddess identified by the circular water pot which she wore on her head, sometimes with the addition of the ceiling-like sky sign, as the hieroglyphic symbol for her name). She is often shown in profile, bending naked over the earth god Geb and sometimes supported by Shu, the god of the air, with her arms and legs bent down so that she touches the horizons with her hands and feet. Because of the conventions of Egyptian art in which the goddess's arms and legs seem to be held together, in these representations she appears as a narrow bridge across the sky (as would certainly be appropriate if she were equated with the Milky Way), though it is possible that she was imagined to cover the whole vault of heaven with her hands and feet respectively placed at the four cardinal points. On the ceiling of the burial chamber of the tomb of Harnesses VI in the Valley of the Kings, the goddess is depicted in two colossal profile images painted back to back separately representing the day and night sky.

Nut was also depicted en face on the undersides of the lids of coffins and sarcophagi - frequently showing the solar disk in the process of being swallowed or reborn. In these representations the depiction of the goddess was placed over the deceased so that a kind of union was achieved, and the coffin itself symbolically became the body of the goddess from whom the deceased would be reborn. The tomb of Tutankhamun may contain an interesting visual allusion to this idea for the young king is shown there with the goddess Nut directly after the ‘opening of the mouth’ ceremony and before he goes before the god Osiris, as though his depiction with Nut represents the transitional time in the coffin between burial and the afterlife. In the

Private tombs of Thebes and in vignettes in the Book of the Dead, Nut is also depicted as a goddess rising from the trunk of the divine sycamore to proffer life-sustaining water and nourishment in the afterlife.

The goddess could also be depicted in zoomor-phic form as the sky cow or sky sow. In her bovine form her four hooves were the cardinal points, and the sun god and stars are often shown sailing across the underside of her body. In this form the divine sky cow was also often shown supported by the air god Shu who stands with upraised arms beneath her, and by Heh gods (see p. 78) who support her legs which are the ‘pillars of the sky’. Because Nut could also be regarded as a female pig, she was also represented in the form of a sow, sometimes shown with her young.