Statue
in stone of the goddess Isis suckling her child, Horus, dating to the
Ptolemaic period (I century B.C.) and now in the Vatican Museums, Vatican
City, Italy. The scene of the goddess suckling Horus was widely popular
and expressed Isis’s role as exemplar model of motherhood. The
goddess was furthermore regarded as helper of women in childbirth and
of their children. The goddess’s headdress was surmounted by cow
horns and emphasized her identification with Hathor, the mother goddess,
reinforcing her maternal role as protectress of women, of love and of
children. The cult of Isis was one of the last bulwarks of paganism
which withstood the diffusion of Christianity in Egypt. The temple dedicated
to the goddess on the island of Philae was definitely closed only under
the reign of Justinian I (VI century A.D.). For this reason, it has
been advanced the hypothesis that Isis cult was not totally lost, but
it had an influence on the subsequent worship of the Virgin Mary, whose
iconography seems to replicate that of the ancient Egyptian goddess
(Benko 2004).
[Image: http://library.artstor.org/library/]