ABSTRACT
Links between milk and the goddess go back to very early times. In Ancient Egypt Hathor appears as a cow-goddess protecting the Pharaoh, and when depicted in human form as a sky-goddess, she wears on her head a sun-disk flanked by cow’s horns. The sky itself might be imagined as a great cow with its belly speckled with stars, which every morning produced a bull-calf, the rising sun (Clark 1959:87; Bleeker 1973:31ff.). Milk was drunk in Egypt and had associations with the Otherworld; milk offerings were made to deities, princes were represented being suckled by goddesses, and the dead Pharaoh as receiving new life from Hathor’s milk on his journey to the nether world (Darby 1977:87, 760). One of the chief Mesopotamian goddesses, Ninhursag, protected the animals of the wild, and also domestic herds (Jacobsen 1976:104ff.); sacred cattle and sheep were kept at her temple at Lagash, and milk from the sacred dairy given to the royal children (Levy 1948:97).
