Hathor is one of the oldest and most many-sided of Egyptian goddesses, and the breadth of her domains, love, beauty, music, dance, drunkenness, motherhood, fertility, reflects a deity worshipped by nearly everyone for millennia. She is shown as a cow, or as a woman with cow's horns cradling the sun-disc, and titled the Golden One and the Lady of Turquoise. Her festivals were joyous and sometimes deliberately drunken: at the Festival of Drunkenness worshippers drank to excess in order to reach the goddess, re-enacting a myth in which humanity was saved from destruction by beer. She presided over the mining regions of Sinai, where at Serabit el-Khadim Egyptians and Semitic-speaking workers alike left inscriptions to her.
Hathor's most distinctive architectural legacy is the Hathor-headed column, a capital carved with her face, cow ears and a small temple-facade crown, used across Egyptian temple architecture for well over a thousand years and still visible in its most complete form lining the hypostyle hall of her temple at Dendera. The type appears as early as the Middle Kingdom and became so closely tied to her that the columns themselves, whatever temple they stood in, functioned as a standing invocation of Hathor's protective presence, one of the clearest cases in Egyptian art of an architectural form doubling as a permanent image of a specific goddess.