The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance

The Egyptian child god Horus, or Harpocrates as it was interpreted in Greek, is the son of Isis and, essentially, the personification of the newborn sun. He is often depicted as a naked boy with the fingertip just below the lips of his mouth, which is in fact the hieroglyphic sign for the word “child.” Here, he is seated on a ram holding a squat jar with his left hand. On his head, he wears the sidelock of youth — conventionally, in ancient Egypt, an identifying feature of a child — and a sun disk flanked by pine cones. He also wears a short cape over his back, and the ram also wears a sun disk.