Massey’s spellings explained: who are Taht, Sut and Anup?

Taht, Sut and Anup are the Egyptian gods Thoth, Set and Anubis, under the spellings Gerald Massey used in his 1907 book Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World. They are not different gods. The names look different because Egyptian writing showed no vowels, so scholars supply them by convention, and many readings have changed since his day. Familiar names such as Thoth and Anubis also reach us through Greek, while for these gods Massey used forms taken from the Egyptian.

Why the names look different: Hieroglyphs wrote the consonants of a word but not its vowels, much as Hebrew and Arabic are usually written. Egyptologists make the words sayable by convention, mostly by putting an e between consonants. Amun’s name, for example, is written imn, so Amun, Amen and Imen are all ways of saying it. Some lost vowels can be recovered from Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, written mainly in Greek letters. Readings also changed as knowledge grew: the name once read Seb is now read Geb, and Sekhet is now Sekhmet.
Why so many names are Greek: Until hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 1820s, Europe knew the Egyptian gods mainly from Greek and Latin writers, and their forms stuck. Thoth, Osiris, Isis, Anubis and Horus are Greek forms of the Egyptian Djehuty, Usir, Aset, Anpu and Heru. Places too: Heliopolis is the Greek name of Iunu, which Massey writes Annu.
Massey’s spellings and today’s names: Taht, or Tehuti, is Thoth, god of writing and the moon. Sut is Set, or Seth. Anup is Anubis, the jackal god of embalming. Seb is Geb, the earth god. Nnu is Nun, the waters before creation, and Apap is Apep, the serpent of darkness. Sekhet is Sekhmet, the lioness goddess, though in Sekhet-Aarru the word means “field”. Amen is Amun, and Pasht or Bast is Bastet. Massey mostly keeps the Greek Osiris, Isis and Horus, but also writes Asar, Hesi and Har. Nu can be Nut, the sky, or Nun. Tuat is the Duat, the world below; Amenta, from the Egyptian Amentet, “the West”, is his name for the whole land of the dead; and the Ritual is the Book of the Dead.
How Gerald Massey used the names: Massey worked from the dictionaries and translations of his day, and many of his spellings were common then; a few are his own. Iusa, a divine “coming son” he builds from the name of the goddess Iusaaset, is not a god Egyptologists recognise. He also reads names as clues and matches them across languages by their sound. Asar, as El-Asar, becomes Lazarus in his reading, and Annu, as Beth-Annu, “house of Annu”, becomes Bethany.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists write the names in today’s usual forms, such as Djehuty, Geb and Sekhmet, and keep the Greek ones, such as Thoth and Osiris, where readers know them. Many of Massey’s spellings were simply the readings of his time, found also in the widely reprinted translations of E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum, and some, such as Seb and Sekhet, have since been corrected. His matching of names by sound is not accepted: linguists read Lazarus as the Hebrew Eleazar, “God has helped”, and likeness of sound alone does not show that two names share an origin.
In Massey’s words: “Anup gives the word, Taht writes it down.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book XII, p. 852)
In the app: Trainer › Word Trainer. In the app, the Word Trainer sets Massey’s spellings beside today’s names, and under each part of the book, “Names in this part” does the same.

Last updated October 28, 2026.

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