for a uraeus could be used as a logogram or determinative for the word "goddess" in any context, because virtually any goddess could be linked with the eye's complex set of attributes. Worship The Eye of Ra was invoked in many areas of Egyptian religion, and its mythology was incorporated into the worship of many of the goddesses identified with it. The eye's flight from and return to Egypt was a common feature of temple ritual in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods (305 BC – AD 390), when the new year and the Nile flood that came along with it were celebrated as the return of the eye after her wanderings in foreign lands. The Egyptians built shrines along the river containing images of animals and dwarfs rejoicing at the goddess' arrival. Scholars do not know how well developed the myth and the corresponding rituals were in earlier times. One of the oldest examples is Mut's return to her home temple in Thebes, which was celebrated there annually as early as the New Kingdom. At the temple of Montu at Medamud, in a festival that may date back to the late Middle Kingdom, it was Montu's consort Raet-Tawy who was equated with Hathor and the eye of Ra. The return of this eye goddess, in fertile, moisture-bearing form, set the stage for her subsequent marriage to Montu and the birth of their mythological child, a form of Horus. The temple's new year festival celebrated her homecoming with drinking and dancing, paralleling the goddess' inebriated state after her pacification. In other cities, two goddesses were worshipped as the belligerent and peaceful forms of the eye, as with Ayet and Nehemtawy at Herakleopolis or Satet and Anuket at Aswan. In another temple ritual, the pharaoh played a ceremonial game in honor of the eye goddesses Hathor, Sekhmet, or Tefnut, in which he struck a ball symbolizing the Eye of Apep with a club made from a type of wood that was said to have sprung from the Eye of Ra. The ritual represents the battle of Ra's eye with its greatest foe. The concept of the solar eye as mother, consort, and daughter of a god was incorporated into royal ideology. Pharaohs took on the role of Ra, and their consorts were associated with the eye and the goddesses equated with it. The sun disks and uraei that were incorporated into queens'