Ancient Egyptian name of the goddess Isis, traditionally understood as throne.
Auset is the original ancient Egyptian name of the goddess the Greeks renamed Isis, and it stands as one of the oldest continuously invoked divine names in human history. Written in hieroglyphs with the symbol of a throne — 𓇋𓏏𓈑 — Auset translates most directly as "she of the throne" or simply "throne," representing not merely furniture but the living seat of royal power. As the divine mother who resurrected Osiris and protected her son Horus, Auset became the supreme emblem of magic, motherhood, and cosmic restoration in Egyptian religion.
Her cult spread beyond Egypt to Greece, Rome, and across the Mediterranean world during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, where temples to Isis (her Grecized name) were constructed as far afield as Britain and Afghanistan. The Roman emperor Caracalla built a temple to her on the Quirinal Hill. Early Christian iconography of the Madonna and Child is widely understood to have been shaped by millennia of visual tradition depicting Auset nursing the infant Horus.
The return to the original Egyptian form "Auset" rather than the Greek "Isis" has been part of a broader Afrocentric and Pan-African cultural movement from the late twentieth century onward, reclaiming the African roots of a civilization long mediated through European lenses. Parents who choose Auset today are making an act of historical recovery — bestowing upon a daughter a name that is 5,000 years old and carries within it the full weight of one of humanity's greatest civilizations.