Deity · Egyptian · c. 2600 BCE
Heqet
Also called Heket, Heqat
The frog-headed goddess of childbirth, whose amulets were worn by pregnant women and whose animal multiplied across Egypt every year as the water went down.
Well sourced
Heqet is a birth goddess, and the frog is hers because of when frogs appear. As the inundation drained off the fields they emerged in numbers nobody could count, at exactly the moment the year's fertility became visible — so the animal reads as new life arriving all at once.
Her cult is domestic rather than monumental. She belongs to the birth chamber: women wore her amulets in labour, and she is named alongside the other powers invoked at delivery. Egyptian religion has a whole class of these figures — Taweret and Bes are the best known — who are almost absent from the state temples and everywhere in ordinary houses, and Heqet is one of them.
That domestic character is why she is easy to underrate from the funerary literature alone, and why the objects tell a different story from the texts.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Qus and Antinoöpolis in Upper Egypt
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Pyramid Texts · c. 2350–2100 BCE
- Rank
- Goddess of Birth
- Pantheon
- Egyptian
- Order
- Egyptian pantheon
- Base of operations
- Qus and Antinoöpolis in Upper Egypt
- Era
- c. 2600 BCE
- Traditions
- Egyptian
Traits
- Domain
- Birth, midwifery, the quickening of life
- Traditional form
- A frog, or a woman with a frog's head
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Heqet, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
- material2
2 texts
Which texts say so?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Heqet, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 850 years
The frog goddess of birth, named among the powers assisting the king's passage. She is otherwise known to this corpus through amulets, and an amulet on its own cannot show whether a figure was official or domestic; the royal burial chamber can.
Worn as a frog amulet by women in labour and set in the birth chamber. Frog forms are among the commonest small protective objects in domestic Egyptian archaeology, which places her cult in the house rather than the temple.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
The second plague is paired with Heqet in every version of the table, and it is the best-founded of the iconographic pairings: the animal really is hers and the reversal is legible, since the sign of fertility becomes the thing in your bed and your oven. The corpus grades it B — a good fit that Exodus itself shows no awareness of.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Heqet?
What rank is Heqet?
How else is Heqet spelled?
What is Heqet said to do?
How old is Heqet?
Nearest in the corpus
If Heqet is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Khepri
The Morning Sun · Egyptian
The sun at dawn, in the form of a scarab beetle rolling it up over the horizon — one of the three daily aspects of the sun, and a pun on the word for coming into being.
Anubis
Guide of the Dead · Egyptian
Embalmer and psychopomp, who leads the dead to the scales — the office Western tradition eventually gives to Michael and to Azrael.
Horus
Falcon King · Egyptian
Son of Osiris, who contends eighty years with Set for the throne. Every living pharaoh was understood to be his incarnation.
Isis
Great of Magic · Egyptian
The great magician who reassembles Osiris and tricks Ra into surrendering his secret name. Her cult eventually reached as far as Roman Britain.
Nephthys
Lady of the House · Egyptian
Set's wife who sides with her sister Isis against him, and mourns Osiris at the head of the bier.
Osiris
Lord of the Dead · Egyptian
Murdered by Set, reassembled by Isis, and installed as judge of the dead. He is the earliest fully developed dying-and-rising sovereign we have.
The books behind Heqet
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Pyramid Texts
Anonymous; carved for the kings and queens of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties · c. 2350–2100 BCE · Old Egyptian
Read The Pyramid Texts in full ↗Egyptian Amulets & Domestic Objects
Anonymous; recovered from settlements and burials · c. 2000 BCE onward · Material evidence
Read Egyptian Amulets & Domestic Objects in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Roland Unger · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.