The Falcon on the Horizon

Egyptian tradition puts a falcon at the top of the sky and calls him Hor, a name usually read as something like the distant one. He is among the earliest divine figures the record preserves: a falcon already stands on the serekh of kings at the very beginning of the dynastic period, before most of the temples that would later house him were built. The sources describe his eyes as the sun and the moon and his speckled breast as the stars, which makes the sky itself his body. He was worshipped in many towns under many epithets, and those cults do not all begin as the same god.