Il rapporto tra gli ḫȝ.tyw e le sette frecce nella demonologia egiziana

Demonology is still a fairly unexplored field as part of the Ancient Egyptian religion studies. The issue has so far been limited to brief articles and essays, which do not allow to establish a methodology and solid criterions to deal with the subject. This is particularly evident in the absence of a chronological and diachronic perspective in the demonological analysis. Egyptian ideas about supernatural beings have been considered as an immutable whole, without any inner development or evolution: entities far apart in time and belonging to different cultural contexts have been placed on the same level. This article aims to analyze the ambiguity caused by considering as identical two different categories of demons, the ḫ3.tyw and the “seven arrows”. Through a contextualized analysis of the sources, the article will show that these two types have different chronological, cultic and iconographic features. The proposed elements will make clear that the assumption ḫ3.tyw = “seven arrows” is valid only in specific circumstances.