Hi. I hope that you do not mind me asking you about your recent post. I am aware that sycamore trees were venerated in Ancient Egypt, however I was under the impression that the goddess Isis was associated with the acacia tree. I might be misinformed, so I am just trying to get a better understanding.
The Sycamore tree, or Tree of Life, is associated with a number of goddesses; primarily Nut and Hathor (Hathor being the tree goddess of Memphis and the one who healed Horus’ eye with ‘milk of the sycamore’ (juice of figs and leaves)), but can be associated with Isis too. All three of those goddesses have the title Lady of the Sycamore. This is why the Hieroglyphs on the inscription in that post say that the Tree of Life in this instance is Isis.
Iusaaset, wife of the creator god Atum and technically the divine ‘grandmother’ of Isis, is the one who is associated with Acacia trees. Her name means ‘She who comes is great’ representing the life growing from the Primordial mound Atum created. In later periods, mostly Graeco-Roman, Isis and Hathor both have Iusaaset as an ‘aspect’ of their divinity so this is probably where it seeps into Isis being associated with it.
There is also the Book of Coming Forth By Day, wherein it states that the Acacia is where the deceased go to, looked after by Iusaaset and is the tree under which Gods and Goddesses were born. There’s also the goddess Shentayet (who when I looked this up I kept finding Pintrest pins from random sites calling her Shontet for some reason) who is usually depicted as a cow, with her name meaning ‘Widow’, who in later periods (again Graeco-Roman times) becomes associated with Isis as an aspect of her called Isis-Shentayet, who represented the wood used to build Osiris’ coffin for his resurrection.
So, the only direct associations of Isis with the Acacia are through later Graeco-Roman syncretisation with minor goddesses. A lot of ‘associations’ I’ve seen on sites about Isis are tangential at best, usually something like ‘Isis flies as a Kite into an Acacia tree and this means she’s the goddess of the Acacia’. Ones like these can be found for many goddesses, and are usually metaphorical (i.e. the Egyptians are trying to say something deep about the religious image they’re putting forth) or just second hand associations like ‘When Horus was in pain he went to the Temple of the Acacia and Isis helps him there’ which really can just be tallied as ‘coincidences’ that people are giving more meaning to than they have.
Basically, Isis is only associated with the Sycamore in the instance I gave, as Isis/Hathor get interchanged a lot and it depends on who a King needs to reference as the divine parent. The Acacia association is something that many gods and goddesses get, as, like the Sycamore, it’s an important tree in Egyptian Mythology. This is heightened in later periods, particularly Graeco-Roman, when the cult of Isis formed and worship of the goddess changed. Egypt has a very long ancient history (5000 years!), and we can’t say that something is true across all time periods. Isis and the Acacia is true for Graeco-Roman times, though still isn’t ‘she’s the goddess of the Acacia’, but isn’t the same for the Pharaonic period. People tend to get their information from sources that popularise the Graeco-Roman forms, and don’t realise that this wasn’t how it always was. It’s how wires get crossed with people looking for information about Egypt a lot.
Finally, it should be noted that gods and goddesses in Ancient Egypt swap roles and mythologies, or even just become interchangeable within the myths (depending on when it was written), so it’s possible, and indeed this is more often than not the case, for divine entities to be the god or goddess of more than one thing at a time. In this case, Isis can be both associated with the Sycamore and with the Acacia.
