Shesmetet
ancient Egyptian goddess
Shesmetet (šsm.t.t) is an ancient Egyptian goddess. She was mentioned in the Pyramid Texts and was usually referred to as the deceased's mother. She was depicted as a lion or a woman with a lion's head, and thus was sometimes considered a form of Sekhmet or Bastet, but one of her epithets – "Lady of Punt" – differentiates her from them and may refer to a possible African origin. Her name comes from shesmet, a sash decorated with beads, which appears on the depictions of Old Kingdom rulers and the god Sopdu.
“Shesmetet” enters the record as ancient Egyptian goddess. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Shesmetet, ancient and Egyptian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Shesmetet” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Shesmetet, ancient and Egyptian provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q19285. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Shesmetet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.