Talk:Eye of Ra/GA1

GA Review
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Reviewer: Redtigerxyz (talk · contribs) 10:26, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Response by A. Parrot
I have made several adjustments to this article to address the 1a concerns. I have also made a separate article on Mehet-Weret, who is not synonymous with Hathor, and adjusted Hathor's article accordingly. I have looked at all uses of "eye" and have capitalized in in several cases, but I kept it in lowercase when the word refers to an eye, in general, and not a specific Eye of Ra or Horus or Atum. (In the case where Ra "grows a new eye" I left it in lowercase, because I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a second Eye of Ra or just an eyeball.) Regarding maat, books on Egyptian religion often write maat when referring to it as a word or a concept and Maat when referring to the goddess. I prefer to maintain that distinction.

As for original research, I have been very careful about that. The connections between the various Eye goddesses have been staring me in the face for a long time, but I didn't write anything about them until I had sources that explicitly describe those connections.

I don't know how you might go about checking all of my sources, but I'll address your example about the clay cobras, where the text that verifies the claim verifies a lot of the other facts in the article. When speaking about the spell inscribed on O. Gardiner 363, the spell that involves the clay uraei, Ritner says:

"In all such cases, the function of the uraeus hearkens back to its well-known origin as the 'fiery eye' of the sun god sent forth against the god's enemies, whether human, divine, or as in O. Gardiner 363, demonic."

A few pages later, he says:

"Concomitant with the developing ritualized use of four uraei is an increasingly elaborate theological interpretation and identification of the serpents themselves as hypostases of the solar eye… The four 'persons' represented by the clay uraei of the Gardiner ostracon comprise… an appropriation of the defense of the solar bark for a private bedroom."

Szpakowska does not specifically mention the Eye of Ra in relation to the clay cobras (although she does say that the cobra represents "the fiery power of the sun"), but her footnotes point to Ritner's study for details about the beliefs underlying their use. I used Szpakowska's study only to support the statement, which she makes, that the cobras may never have been used to burn anything.

As for the question-mark signs for criteria 1b and 6b, I would like to see the specifics of your concerns so I can address them. A. Parrot (talk) 02:34, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

I give this article 1 more week. The nominator needs to be go back and check if all sources explicitly relate the things said to the Eye of Ra. Szpakowska does not relate the cobras to the Eye, but the article sentence referenced to the book does. "Whether literal or metaphorical, the flames in the cobras' mouths, like the fiery venom spat by the Eye of Ra, were meant to dispel the nocturnal darkness". Another example of OR could be "The characteristics of the Eye of Ra were an important part of the Egyptian conception of female divinity in general.[21] Therefore, the Eye was equated with many goddesses". I googled Google Books most associations are there, so the article has some OR currently, but not much. Some books/sites show the right eye as an image for the Eye of Re. Not sure if it should be included. -- Redtigerxyz Talk 17:47, 12 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I have gone over the sources again and removed from the article any statement that is not present in them. There are cases where I stated things that the sources do not state but strongly imply; unfortunately, it's easy to do that when one is immersed in the subject matter, even when one is watching out for it. Everything remaining in the article is directly connected to the Eye of Ra, except the passages by Lesko talking about the sun disk. I left those parts in because the sun disk may not always be the Eye of Ra, but unquestionably it very often is the Eye of Ra (Troy practically treats the two terms synonymously), and I think it gives a better idea of what the Eye is if the article states that the Disk-Thing That Is Sometimes the Eye of Ra may actually be a sphere.


 * I would have liked to include an image of an actual eye, but part of the problem is that I don't think the Egyptians applied the right eye/left eye distinction very strictly. For example, this famous amulet from Tutankhamun's tomb is always labeled as an Eye of Horus, even though it's a right eye. There is one image of an eye that, according to an Egyptological book I have, specifically represents the Eye of Ra: a vignette from the Book of the Dead of Neferrenpet in which Thoth gives the Eye to Ra. Unfortunately, I can't find an image of it except in rather low-quality black and white. I could add that image, but considering its quality, I'd rather not. A. Parrot (talk) 00:28, 14 February 2012 (UTC)


 * GA Pass. -- Redtigerxyz Talk 17:45, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Note: In my zeal to demonstrate the article's accuracy, I used long quotations from Ritner's paper in my post on February 6. Not wanting to violate copyright law or Wikipedia rules about non-free content, I am now greatly shortening these quotations. A. Parrot (talk) 01:36, 28 March 2012 (UTC)