The Knife in the Old Texts

The earliest tradition to name him is not a gentle one. In a passage of the Pyramid Texts sometimes called the Cannibal Hymn, the dead king hunts and consumes the gods to take their power into himself, and Khonsu is described there as the one who cuts the lords down for him. The healer and divine child of later Thebes is a long way from that figure, and whether they are one god changed by time or two who share a name is not something the evidence settles. The order is settled: the knife is attested first, and treating the friendly late version as the original gets the chronology backwards.