Ancient Egyptian Mythology

Ancient Egyptian mythology is the collection of myths from ancient Egypt that describe the Egyptian gods’ actions as a means of understanding the world around them. These myths’ beliefs are an essential part of ancient Egyptian religion. Legends frequently appear in Egyptian writings and art, concise stories and religious material such as hymns, ritual texts, funerary texts, and temple decorations. These sources rarely contain a complete myth account and often describe only brief fragments.

Influence of Nature

Inspired by the cycles of nature, the Egyptians saw time in the present as a series of recurring patterns, whereas the earliest periods were linear. Myths merged in these earliest times, and legend sets the way for the present cycles. Present events repeat the events of myth and, in doing so, renew Maat, the fundamental order of the universe. Amongst the most important episodes from the mythic past are the creation myths, in which the gods form the cosmos out of primordial chaos; the stories of the reign of the sun god Ra upon the earth; and the Osiris myth, concerning the struggles of the gods Osiris, Isis, and Horus against the disruptive god Set.

Events from the present that observers might regard as myths include Ra’s daily journey through the world and its otherworldly counterpart, the Duat. Recurring themes in these mythic episodes include the conflict between the upholders of Maat and the forces of disorder, the importance of the pharaoh in maintaining Maat, and the continual death and regeneration of the gods.

These sacred events differ significantly from one text to another and often seem contradictory. Egyptian myths are primarily metaphorical, translating the essence and behaviour of deities into terms that humans can understand. Each variant of a myth represents a different symbolic perspective, enriching the Egyptians’ understanding of the gods and the world.

Ancient Egyptian mythology profoundly influenced Egyptian culture. It inspired or influenced many religious rituals and provided the ideological basis for kingship. In tombs, temples, and amulets, scenes and symbols from myth appeared in art. In literature, writers used tales or elements in stories that range from humour to allegory, demonstrating that the Egyptians adapted mythology to serve various purposes.

Origins of Ancient Egyptian Mythology

The development of Egyptian myth is difficult to trace. Egyptologists must make educated guesses about its earliest phases based on written sources that later appeared. One apparent influence on mythology is the Egyptians’ natural surroundings. Each day, the sun rose and set, bringing light to the land and regulating human activity; each year, the Nile flooded, renewing the fertility of the soil and allowing the highly productive farming that sustained Egyptian civilisation.

These themes—order, chaos, and renewal—repeatedly appear in Egyptian religious thought. Thus, the Egyptians saw water and the sun as symbols of life and thought of time as a series of natural cycles. This orderly pattern was at constant risk of disruption: shallow floods resulted in famine, and high floods destroyed crops and buildings. The hospitable Nile valley was surrounded by harsh desert, populated by the Egyptians regarded as uncivilised enemies of order. The Egyptians saw their land as an isolated place of stability, or Maat, surrounded and endangered by chaos.

Rituals

Another possible source of ancient mythology is ritual. Many rituals refer to myths and are sometimes based directly on them. However, it is difficult to determine whether a culture’s myths developed before practices or vice versa. Questions about this relationship between myth and ritual have spawned much discussion among Egyptologists and scholars of comparative religion. In ancient Egypt, the earliest evidence of religious practices predates written tales. Ceremonies early in Egyptian history included only a few motifs from mythology. Some scholars have argued that rituals emerged before myths in Egypt. Nevertheless, the question may never be resolved because the early evidence is sparse.

In private rituals, often called “magical”, the myth and the ritual are closely tied. Many myth-like stories in the ritual texts are not found in other sources. Even the widespread motif of the goddess Isis rescuing her poisoned son Horus appears only in this text.

Myths

Ancient Egyptian mythology consists of origin myths explaining the beginnings of various world elements, including human institutions and natural phenomena. Kingship arose among the divinities at the beginning of time and later passed to the human pharaohs; warfare originates when humans begin fighting each other after the sun god’s withdrawal into the sky. Myths also describe the supposed beginnings of less fundamental traditions. In a minor mythic episode, Horus becomes angry with his mother, Isis, and cuts her head. Isis replaces her lost head with that of a cow. This event explains why Isis was sometimes depicted with cow horns as a part of her headdress.

Effect of Events

Historical events may have inspired some myths. Egyptian sources link the mythical strife between the gods Horus and Set with a conflict between Upper and Lower Egypt regions, which may have happened in the late Predynastic era or the Early Dynastic Period. The unification of Egypt under the pharaohs at the end of the Predynastic Period around 3100 BC made the king the focus of Egyptian religion. Thus, the ideology of kingship became an essential part of ancient Egyptian mythology. In the wake of unification, gods once local patron deities gained national importance, forming new relationships that linked the local deities into a unified national tradition. Geraldine Pinch suggests that early myths may have originated from these relationships.

After these early times, most changes to ancient Egyptian mythology developed and adapted preexisting concepts rather than creating new ones, although there were exceptions. Many scholars have suggested that the myth of the sun god withdrawing into the sky, leaving humans to fight among themselves, was inspired by the breakdown of royal authority and national unity at the end of the Old Kingdom (c. 2686 BC – 2181 BC). In the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC), minor myths developed around deities like Yam and Anat, adopted from the Canaanite religion. In contrast, Greco-Roman culture had little influence on Egyptian mythology during the Greek and Roman eras (332 BC–641 AD).

Definition and Scope

Scholars have difficulty defining which ancient Egyptian beliefs are myths. The basic definition of myth suggested by the Egyptologist John Baines is “a sacred or culturally central narrative”. In Egypt, the narratives central to culture and religion are almost entirely about events among the gods. Actual narratives about the gods’ actions are rare in Egyptian texts, particularly from early periods, and most references to such events are mere mentions or allusions. Some Egyptologists, like Baines, argue that narratives complete enough to be called “myths” existed in all periods but that Egyptian tradition did not favour writing them down.

Others, like Jan Assmann, have said that true myths were rare in Egypt and may only have emerged partway through its history, developing from the fragments of narration that appear in the earliest writings. However, Vincent Arieh Tobin and Susanne Bickel have recently suggested that lengthy narration was unnecessary in Egyptian mythology because of its complex and flexible nature. Tobin argues that narrative is even alien to myth because narratives form a fixed and clear perspective on their described events. If narration is unnecessary for the legend, any statement conveying an idea about nature or actions can be called “mythic”.

Content and Meaning

Like myths in many other cultures, Egyptian myths justify human traditions and address fundamental questions about the world, such as the nature of the disorder and the universe’s ultimate fate. The Egyptians explained these profound issues through statements about the gods.

Egyptian deities represent natural phenomena, from physical objects like the earth or the sun to abstract forces like knowledge and creativity. The actions and interactions of the gods, the Egyptians believed, governed the behaviour of all of these forces and elements. The Egyptians did not describe these mysterious processes in explicit theological writings. Instead, the relationships and interactions of the gods illustrated such methods implicitly.

Mythic events are significant expressions of their roles in the cosmos, for the gods are deeply involved in narratives. Egypt’s gods, including many major ones, do not have substantial positions in mythic narratives. However, their nature and relationships with other deities are often established in lists or bare statements without narration. Therefore, if only narratives are myths, mythology is a significant element in Egyptian religious understanding but not as essential as in many other cultures.

The true realm of the gods is mysterious and inaccessible to humans. Mythological stories use symbolism to make the events in this realm comprehensible. Not every detail of a mythic account has symbolic significance. Some images and incidents are meant simply as visual or dramatic embellishments of broader, more meaningful myths, even in religious texts.

Stories

Few complete stories appear in Egyptian mythological sources. These sources often contain nothing more than allusions to the events they relate to, and texts that contain actual narratives tell only portions of a larger story. Thus, the Egyptians may have had only the general outlines for any given myth, from which fragments describing particular incidents were drawn. Moreover, the gods are not well-defined characters, and the motivations for their sometimes inconsistent actions are rarely given. Egyptian myths are not, therefore, fully developed tales. Their importance lies in their underlying meaning, not their characteristics as stories. Instead of merging into lengthy, fixed narratives, they remained flexible and non-dogmatic.

Creation

Many descriptions of the creation of the world and the sun’s movements occur in Egyptian texts, some very different from each other. So flexible were Egyptian myths that they could seemingly conflict with each other. The relationships between gods were fluid, so the goddess Hathor could be called the mother, wife, or daughter of the sun god Ra. Separate deities could even be syncretised or linked as a single being. Thus, the creator god Atum was combined with Ra to form Ra-Atum.

One commonly suggested reason for inconsistencies in myth is that religious ideas differed over time and in different regions. The local cults of various deities developed theologies centred on their patron gods. As the influence of other cults shifted, some mythological systems attained national dominance. In the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC), the most important of these systems was the cults of Ra and Atum, centred at Heliopolis. They formed a mythical family, the Ennead, that was said to have created the world. It included the most important deities but gave priority to Atum and Ra.

Religious Ideas

The Egyptians also overlaid old religious ideas with new ones. For instance, the god Ptah, whose cult was centred in Memphis, was also the world’s creator. Ptah’s creation myth incorporates older myths by saying that the Ennead carries out Ptah’s creative commands. Thus, the myth makes Ptah older and more significant than the Ennead. Many scholars have seen this myth as a political attempt to assert the superiority of Memphis’ gods over those of Heliopolis. Combining concepts, the Egyptians produced an immensely complicated set of deities and myths.

In the early twentieth century, Egyptologists thought that politically motivated changes like these were the principal reason for the contradictory imagery in Egyptian myth. However, in the 1940s, Henri Frankfort, realising the symbolic nature of Egyptian mythology, argued that contradictory ideas are part of the “multiplicity of approaches” that the Egyptians used to understand the divine realm. Frankfort’s arguments are the basis for much of the more recent analysis of Egyptian beliefs.

Political changes affected Egyptian beliefs, but the ideas that emerged through those changes also had more profound meaning. The varying symbols of Egyptian mythology express opinions too complex to be seen through a single lens. Multiple versions of the same myth represent different aspects of the same phenomenon; other gods that behave similarly reflect the close connections between natural forces.

Sources of Ancient Egyptian Mythology

Without a single canonical version of any myth, the Egyptians adopted broad folklore traditions to fit the varied purposes of their writings. The sources that are available range from solemn hymns to entertaining stories. Therefore, most Egyptians were illiterate and had an elaborate oral tradition of transmitting myths through spoken storytelling.

Susanne Bickel suggests that the existence of this tradition helps explain why many texts related to myth give little detail: the myths were already known to every Egyptian. Very little evidence of this oral tradition has survived, and modern knowledge of Egyptian myths comes from written and pictorial sources. Only a few of these sources have survived, and much mythological information has been lost. This information is not equally abundant in all periods, so the Egyptians’ beliefs in some eras are more poorly understood than those in better-documented times.

Religious Sources

Many gods appear in artwork from the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt’s history (c. 3100–2686 BC). However, little about the gods’ actions can be gleaned from these sources because they include minimal writing. The Egyptians began writing more extensively in the Old Kingdom, where the first significant source of Egyptian mythology appeared: the Pyramid Texts. These texts are a collection of several hundred incantations inscribed in the interiors of pyramids beginning in the 24th century BC. They were the first Egyptian funerary texts to ensure that the kings buried in the pyramid would pass safely through the afterlife. Many of the incantations allude to myths related to the afterlife, including creation myths and the myth of Osiris. Many texts are likely much older than their first written copies, providing clues about the early stages of Egyptian religious belief.

Coffin Texts

During the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181–2055 BC), the Pyramid Texts developed into the Coffin Texts, which contained similar material and were available to non-royals. It also included succeeding funerary texts created from these earlier collections, like the Book of the Dead in the New Kingdom and the Books of Breathing from the Late Period (664–323 BC). The New Kingdom also saw the development of another type of funerary text containing detailed and cohesive descriptions of the nocturnal journey of the sun god. Textbooks of this type include the Amduat, the Book of Gates, and the Book of Caverns.

Temples

Temples, whose surviving remains date mainly from the New Kingdom and later, are another vital source of myth. Many temples had a per-ankh, or temple library, storing papyri for rituals and other uses. Some papyri contain hymns, which often refer to the myths that define those actions in praising a god for its efforts. Other temple papyri describe rituals which are based partly on tales. Scattered remnants of these papyrus collections have survived to the present. The groups possibly included more systematic records of legends, but no evidence of such texts has survived. Mythological texts and illustrations, similar to those on temple papyri, also appear in the decoration of the temple buildings. The elaborately decorated and well-preserved temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods (305 BC-AD 380) are a rich source of myth.

The Egyptians also performed personal goals such as protection from or healing illness. These rituals are often called “magical” rather than religious. However, they were believed to work on the same principles as temple ceremonies, evoking mythical events as the basis for the ritual.

Traditional restrictions on describing and depicting limited information from religious sources. The murder of the god Osiris, for instance, is never explicitly described in Egyptian writings. The Egyptians believed that words and images could affect reality, so they avoided the risk of making such adverse events real. The conventions of Egyptian art were also poorly suited for portraying whole narratives, so most myth-related artwork consists of sparse individual scenes.

Other Sources

References to myth also appear in non-religious Egyptian literature, beginning in the Middle Kingdom. Many of these references are allusions to mythic motifs, but several stories are based entirely on mythical narratives. These more direct renderings of myth are particularly common in the Late and Greco-Roman periods. According to Heike Sternberg, Egyptian myths reached their most fully developed state.

The attitudes toward myth in non-religious Egyptian texts vary greatly. Some stories resemble narratives from magical texts, while others are more clearly meant as entertainment and contain humorous episodes.

Greek and Roman writers like Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, a definitive source of Egyptian myth, described Egyptian religion in the last centuries. Prominent among these writers is Plutarch, whose work De Iside et Osiride contains, among other things, the most extended ancient account of the myth of Osiris. These authors’ knowledge of Egyptian religion was limited because they were excluded from many religious practices, and their statements about Egyptian beliefs are affected by their biases about Egypt’s culture.

Cosmology Appearance in Ancient Mythology

Maat

The written Egyptian word m3ˁt, often rendered Maat or ma’at, refers to the fundamental order of the universe in Egyptian belief. Established in creating the world, Maat distinguishes the world from the chaos that preceded and surrounded it. Maat encompasses both the proper behaviour of humans and the normal functioning of the forces of nature, making life and happiness possible. Because the actions of the gods govern natural forces and myths express those actions, Egyptian mythology represents the proper functioning of the world and the sustenance of life itself.

To the Egyptians, the essential human maintainer of Maat is the pharaoh. In myth, the pharaoh is the son of a variety of deities. He is their designated representative, obligated to maintain order in human society just as they do in nature and to continue the rituals that sustain them and their activities.

The shape of the world

In Egyptian belief, the disorder that predates the ordered world exists beyond the world as an infinite expanse of formless water, personified by the god Nun. The earth, exemplified by the god Geb, is a flat piece of land that arches from the sky, usually represented by the goddess Nut. The two are separated by the personification of air, Shu. The sun god Ra travels through the atmosphere, across the body of Nut, enlivening the world with his light. At night, Ra passes beyond the western horizon into the Duat, a mysterious region that borders the formlessness of Nun. At dawn, he emerges from the Duat on the eastern horizon.

Sky

The nature of the sky and the location of the Duat are uncertain. Egyptian texts variously describe the nighttime sun as travelling beneath the earth and within the body of Nut. The Egyptologist James P. Allen believes these explanations of the sun’s movements are different but coexisting ideas. In Allen’s view, Nut represents the visible surface of the waters of Nun, with the stars floating on this surface. The sun, therefore, sails across the water in a circle, passing each night beyond the horizon to reach the skies that arch beneath the inverted Duat’s land.

Leonard H. Lesko, however, believes that the Egyptians saw the sky as a solid canopy and described the sun as travelling through the Duat above the surface of the sky, from west to east, during the night. Modifying Lesko’s model, Joanne Conman argues that this solid sky is a moving, concave dome overarching deeply convex earth. The sun and the stars move along with this dome, and their passage below the horizon is their movement over areas of the planet that the Egyptians could not see. These regions would then be the Duat.

The fertile lands of the Nile Valley (Upper Egypt) and Delta (Lower Egypt) lie at the centre of the world in Egyptian cosmology. Outside them are the barren deserts associated with the chaos beyond the world. Somewhere beyond them is the horizon, the akhet. There, two mountains, in the east and the west, mark where the sun enters and exits the Duat.

Homeland

Foreign nations are associated with the hostile deserts in Egyptian ideolUnfamiliarreign people, likewise, are generally lumped in with the “nine bows”, people who threaten pharaonic rule and the stability of Maat, although peoples allied with or subject to Egypt may be viewed more positively. For these reasons, events in Egyptian mythology rarely take place in foreign lands. At the same time, in some stories about the sky or the Duat, Egypt is usually the scene of the actions of the gods. Often, even the myths set in Egypt seem to take place on a plane of existence separate from those inhabited by living humans, although humans and gods interact in other stories. In either case, the Egyptian gods are deeply tied to their homeland.

Time

Their environment influenced the Egyptians’ vision of time. Each day, the sun rose and set, bringing light to the land and regulating human activity; each year, the Nile flooded, renewing the fertility of the soil and allowing the highly productive agriculture that sustained Egyptian civilisation. These periodic events inspired the Egyptians to see all of the time as a series of recurring patterns regulated by Maat, renewing the gods and the universe. Although the Egyptians recognised that different historical eras differ in their particulars, mythic patterns dominate the Egyptian perception of history.

Many Egyptian stories about the gods are characterised as having occurred in an ancient time when the gods were manifest on the earth and ruled over it. After this time, the Egyptians believed the authority on earth passed to human pharaohs. This primaeval era seems to predate the start of the sun’s journey and the recurring patterns of the present world. The end of time is the end of the cycles and the world’s dissolution.

Because these distant periods lend themselves to linear narratives better than the current cycles, John Baines sees them as the only periods in which true myths occur. However, to some extent, the cyclical aspect of time was also present in the mythic past. Egyptians saw even stories set in that time as being perpetually valid. The myths were made real every time the events to which they were related occurred. These events were celebrated with rituals, which often evoked myths. Rituals allowed time to periodically return to the mythic past and renew life in the universe.

Myths Representing the Ancient Egypt Mythology

Because of the fragmentary nature of Egyptian myths, there is little indication in Egyptian sources of a chronological sequence of mythical events. No doubt, some significant myths formed the ancient Egyptian methodology.

Creation

Among the essential myths were those describing the creation of the world. The Egyptians developed many accounts of the invention, which differ significantly in their related events. In particular, the deities credited with creating the world vary in each performance. This difference partly reflects the desire of Egypt’s cities and priesthoods to exalt their patron gods by attributing creation to them. However, the differing statements were contradictory; instead, the Egyptians saw the creation process as having many aspects involving many divine forces.

Accounts from the first millennium BC focus on the actions of the creator god in subduing the forces of chaos that threaten the newly ordered world. One common feature of the myths is the emergence of the world from the waters of confusion surrounding it. This event represents the establishment of Maat and the origin of life.

Ogdoad

One fragmentary tradition centres on the eight gods of the Ogdoad, who represent the characteristics of the primaeval water itself. Their actions give rise to the sun, represented in creation myths by various gods, especially Ra, whose birth forms a space of light and dryness within the dark water. The sun rises from the first mound of dry land, another common motif in the creation myths, which was likely inspired by the sight of mounds of earth emerging as the Nile flood receded. With the emergence of the sun god, the establisher of Maat, the world has its first ruler.

Atum, a god closely connected with the sun and the primaeval mound, focuses on a creation myth dating back to the Old Kingdom. Atum, who incorporates all the elements of the world, exists within the waters as a potential being. At the time of creation, he emerges to produce other divinities, resulting in nine deities, the Ennead, which includes Geb, Nut, and other vital elements of the world. The Ennead can, by extension, stand for all the gods, so its creation represents the differentiation of Atum’s unified potential into the diversity of elements in the world.

Magic

Over time, the Egyptians developed more abstract perspectives on the creation process. By the time of the Coffin Texts, they described the formation of the world as the realisation of a concept first developed within the mind of the creator god. The force of heka, or magic, which links things in the divine realm and stuff in the physical world, is the power that connects the creator’s original concept with its physical realisation. Heka can be personified as a god, but this intellectual creation process is not associated with that god alone.

An inscription from the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070–664 BC), whose text may be much older, describes the process and attributes it to the god Ptah. His close association with artisans makes him a suitable deity to give the original creative vision physical form. Hymns from the New Kingdom describe Amun, a mysterious power behind even the other gods, as the ultimate source of this creative vision.

The origin of humans is not a significant feature of Egyptian creation stories. In some texts, the first humans sprung from tears that Ra-Atum or his feminine aspect, the Eye of Ra, sheds in a moment of weakness and distress, foreshadowing humans’ flawed nature and sorrowful lives. Others say humans are moulded from clay by the god Khnum. However, overall, the focus of the creation myths is the establishment of cosmic order rather than the special place of humans within it.

Reign of the Sun God

In the Period of the mythic past after the creation, Ra dwells on earth as king of the gods and humans. This Period is the closest thing to a golden age in Egyptian tradition, the Period of stability that the Egyptians constantly sought to evoke and imitate. Nevertheless, the stories about Ra’s reign focus on conflicts between him and forces that disrupt his rule, reflecting the king’s role in Egyptian ideology as Maat’s enforcer.

Help of Gods

In an episode known in different versions from temple texts, some of the gods defy Ra’s authority, and he destroys them with the help and advice of other gods like Thoth and Horus the Elder. At one point, he faces dissent even from an extension of himself, the Eye of Ra, which can act independently of him in the form of a goddess.

The Eye goddess becomes angry with Ra and runs away from him, wandering wild and dangerous lands outside Egypt. Weakened by her absence, Ra sends one of the other gods—Shu, Thoth, or Anhur, in different accounts—to retrieve her by force or persuasion. Upon her return, the goddess becomes Ra’s consort or the god who has recovered her. Her pacification restores order and renews life. Because the Eye of Ra is associated with the star Sothis, whose heliacal rising signalled the start of the Nile flood, the return of the Eye goddess to Egypt coincides with the life-giving inundation.

Destruction of Humanity

As Ra grows older and weaker, humanity, too, turns against him. In an episode often called “The Destruction of Human Beings”, related to The Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra discovers that humanity is plotting rebellion against him and sends his Eye to punish them. She slays many people, but Ra decides he does not want her to destroy society. He has beer dyed red to resemble blood and spreads it over the field. The Eye Goddess drinks the beer, becomes drunk, and ceases her rampage. Ra then withdraws into the sky, weary of ruling on earth, and begins his daily journey through the heavens and the Duat. The surviving humans are dismayed, attacking the people who plotted against Ra. This event is the origin of warfare, death, and humans’ constant struggle to protect Maat from the destructive actions of other people.

In The Book of the Heavenly Cow, the results of the destruction of humankind seem to mark the end of the direct reign of the gods and of the linear time of myth. The beginning of Ra’s journey is the beginning of the cyclical time of the present. Nevertheless, in other sources, mythic time continues after this change. Egyptian accounts give sequences of divine rulers who take the sun god’s place as king on earth, each reigning for thousands of years.

Although accounts differ as to which gods reigned and in what order, the succession from Ra-Atum to his descendants Shu and Geb—in which the kingship passes to the male in each generation of the Ennead—is common. Both face revolts that parallel those in the reign of the sun god, but the revolt that receives the most attention in Egyptian sources is the one in the power of Geb’s heir, Osiris.

Osiris myth

The collection of episodes surrounding Osiris‘ death and succession is the most elaborate Egyptian myth, and it had the most widespread influence on Egyptian culture. In the first portion of the legend, Osiris, associated with fertility and kingship, is killed, and his position usurped by his brother Set. In some versions of the myth, Osiris is dismembered, and the pieces of his corpse are scattered across Egypt. Osiris’ sister and wife, Isis, finds her husband’s body and restores it to wholeness. She is assisted by funerary deities such as Nephthys and Anubis, and the process of Osiris’ restoration reflects Egyptian traditions of embalming and burial. Isis then briefly revives Osiris to conceive an heir with him: Horus.

Horus’ birth

The next portion of the myth concerns Horus‘ birth and childhood. Isis gives birth to and raises her son in secluded places, hidden from the menace of Set. The episodes in this phase of the myth concern Isis’s efforts to protect her son from Set or other hostile beings or heal him from sickness or injury. In these episodes, Isis is the epitome of maternal devotion and a powerful practitioner of healing magic.

Struggle with Set

Horus competes with Set for the kingship in the third phase of the story. Their struggle encompasses many episodes and ranges in character, from violent conflict to a legal judgment by the assembled gods. In one crucial episode, Set tears out one or both of Horus’ eyes, which are later restored by the healing efforts of Thoth or Hathor. For this reason, the Eye of Horus is a prominent symbol of life and well-being in Egyptian iconography. Because Horus is a sky god, with one Eye equated with the sun and the other with the moon, the destruction and restoration of the single Eye explain why the moon is less bright than the sun.

Resolution of the divine contest

Texts present two resolutions for the divine contest: Egypt had the two claimants, and Horus became the sole ruler. In the latter version, the ascension of Horus, Osiris‘ rightful heir, symbolises the re-establishment of Maat after the unrighteous rule of Set. Horus can perform the funerary rites for his father; that is his duty as son and heir with order restored. Osiris is given new life in the Duat through this service, whose ruler he becomes. The relationship between Osiris as king of the dead and Horus as king of the living stands for every king’s relationship with his deceased predecessors. Meanwhile, Osiris represented the regeneration of life. He was credited with the annual growth of crops on earth, and in the Duat, he was involved in the rebirth of the sun and deceased human souls.

Although Horus, to some extent, represents any living pharaoh, he is not the end of the lineage of ruling gods. He is succeeded first by gods and then by spirits representing dim memories of Egypt’s Predynastic rulers, the souls of Nekhen and Pe. They link the entirely mythical rulers to the final part of the sequence, the lineage of Egypt’s historical kings.

Birth of the royal child

Several disparate Egyptian texts address a similar theme: the birth of a divinely fathered child heir to the kingship. The earliest known appearance of such a story is not a myth but an entertaining folktale, found in the Middle Kingdom Westcar Papyrus, about the birth of the first three kings of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty. In that story, the three kings are the offspring of Ra and a human woman.

The same theme appears in a firmly religious context in the New Kingdom, when Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, and Ramesses II depicted their conception and birth in temple reliefs. Amun is the father, and the historical queen is the mother. By stating that the king originated among the gods and was deliberately created by the most important god of the Period, the story gives a mythical background to the king’s coronation, which appears alongside the birth story. The divine connection legitimises the king’s rule and rationale for his role as an intercessor between gods and humans.

Similar scenes appear in many post-New Kingdom temples, but the events they depict involve the gods alone. Ancient Egyptians dedicated Most temples to a mythical family of deities in this Period, usually a father, mother, and son. In these versions of the story, the birth is that of the son in each triad. Each of these child gods is the heir to the throne, who will restore stability to the country. This shift in focus from the human king to the gods associated with him reflects a decline in the status of the pharaoh in the late stages of Egyptian history.

The journey of the sun

Egyptian sources do not fully narrate Ra’s movements through the sky and the Duat. However, funerary texts like the Amduat, Book of Gates, and Caverns relate to the nighttime half of the journey in vignettes. This journey is vital to Ra’s nature and the sustenance of all life.

Ra brings light to the earth by travelling across the sky, sustaining all living there. He reaches the peak of his strength at noon and then ages and weakens as he moves toward sunset. In the evening, Ra takes the form of Atum, the creator god, the oldest of all things in the world. According to early Egyptian texts, he spits out all the other deities he devoured at sunrise. Here, they represent the stars, and the story explains why they are visible at night and seemingly absent during the day.

Ra passes through the akhet, the horizon, in the west at sunset. At times, the horizon is described as a gate or door that leads to the Duat. At others, the sky goddess Nut swallows the sun god so that his journey through the Duat runs through her body.

Duat

Ancient Egyptians portrayed the Duat and its deities in funerary texts in elaborate, detailed, and widely varying imagery. These images are Duat’s extraordinary and enigmatic symbolic nature, where the contact with the original creation powers renewed both the gods and the dead. Indeed, although Egyptian texts avoid saying it explicitly, Ra’s entry into the Duat is seen as his death.

Specific themes repeatedly appear in depictions of the journey. Ra overcomes numerous obstacles in his course, representing the effort necessary to maintain Maat. The greatest challenge is the opposition of Apep, a serpent god who represents the destructive aspect of the disorder and threatens to destroy the sun god and plunge creation into chaos. In many texts, Ra overcomes these obstacles with the assistance of other deities who travel with him; they stand for various necessary powers to uphold Ra’s authority. Ra also brings light to the Duat in his passage, enlivening the blessed dead. In contrast, his enemies—people who have undermined Maat—are tormented and thrown into dark pits or lakes of fire.

Meeting with Osiris

The critical event in the journey is the meeting of Ra and Osiris. In the New Kingdom, this event became a complex symbol of the Egyptian conception of life and time. Relegated to the Duat, Osiris is like a mummified body within its tomb. Endlessly moving Ra is like the ba, or soul, of a deceased human, which may travel during the day but must return to its body each night. When Ra and Osiris meet, they merge into a single being. Their pairing reflects the Egyptian vision of time as a continuous repeating pattern, with one member (Osiris) always static and the other (Ra) living in a constant cycle. Once he has united with Osiris’ regenerative power, Ra continues his journey with renewed vitality.

This renewal makes possible Ra‘s emergence at dawn, the rebirth of the sun—expressed by a metaphor in which Nut gives birth to Ra after she has swallowed him—and the repetition of the first sunrise at the moment of creation. At this moment, the rising sun god swallows the stars once more, absorbing their power. In this revitalised state, Ra is depicted as a child or as the scarab beetle god Khepri, representing rebirth in Egyptian iconography.

End of the universe

Egyptian texts typically treat the world’s dissolution as possible to be avoided. So, these texts do not often describe it in detail. However, many texts allude to the idea that the world will end after countless renewal cycles. This end occurred in a passage in the Coffin Texts and a more explicit one in the Book of the Dead, in which Atum says that he will one day dissolve the ordered world and return to his primaeval, inert state within the waters of chaos. All things other than the creator will cease to exist, except Osiris, who will survive.

There is the potential for a new creation to arise like the old. Details about this eschatological prospect are unclear, including the fate of the dead associated with Osiris. Nevertheless, together with the creator god and the god of renewal in the waters, that gave rise to the orderly world.

Influence of Ancient Egyptian Mythology on Egyptian culture

In religion

Because the Egyptians rarely described theological ideas explicitly, the implicit beliefs of mythology formed much of the basis for Egyptian religion. Egyptian religion’s purpose was to maintain Maat, and the concepts that myths express are essential to Maat. The rituals of Egyptian religion make the mythic events and the concepts they represented real once more, renewing Maat. The ancient Egyptians believed patterns achieved this effect through the force of Heka, the same connection between the physical and divine realms that enabled the original creation.

Mythical events

For this reason, Egyptian rituals often included actions that symbolised mythical events. Temple rites included destroying models representing malign gods like Set or Apophis; private magical spells called upon Isis to heal the sick as she did for Horus. Also, it included funerary rites such as the Opening of the Mouth ceremony and ritual offerings to the dead that evoked the myth of Osiris’ resurrection. Nevertheless, rituals rarely, if ever, involved dramatic reenactments of myths. There are borderline cases, like a ceremony alluding to the Osiris myth in which two women took on the roles of Isis and Nephthys. However, scholars disagree about whether these performances formed sequences of events. Many Egyptian rituals focused on more basic activities like giving offerings to the gods, with mythic themes serving as ideological background rather than a rite’s focus.

Nevertheless, myth and ritual strongly influenced each other. Tales could inspire traditions, like the ceremony with Isis and Nephthys. Ways that did not initially have a mythic meaning could be reinterpreted as having one. For example, in the case of offering ceremonies, Egyptians equated with the Eye of Horus food and other items to the gods or the dead.

Kingship

Kingship was an essential element of Egyptian religion through the king’s role as the link between humanity and the gods. Myths explain the background for this connection between royalty and divinity. The myths about the Ennead establish the king as heir to the lineage of rulers reaching back to the creator; the legend of divine birth states that the king is the son and heir of a god. Also, the myths about Osiris and Horus emphasise that rightful succession to the throne is essential to the maintenance of Maat. Thus, mythology provided the rationale for the very nature of the Egyptian government.

In art

Illustrations of gods and mythical events appear extensively alongside religious writing in tombs, temples, and funerary texts. Egyptians rarely placed mythological scenes of Egyptian artwork in sequence as a narrative, but individual scenes, mainly depicting Osiris’s resurrection, sometimes appear in religious paintings.

Allusions to myth were very widespread in Egyptian art and architecture. In temple design, the central path of the temple axis mirrored the sun god’s way across the sky, and the sanctuary at the end of the route represented the place of creation from which he rose. Temple decoration was filled with solar emblems that underscored this relationship. Similarly, the corridors of tombs reflected the god’s journey through the Duat and the burial chamber with the tomb of Osiris. The pyramid, the best-known Egyptian architectural form, demonstrates the effect of mythic symbolism. It represented the mound of creation and the earliest sunrise, appropriate for a monument to assure the owner’s rebirth after death. Ancients frequently reinterpreted symbols in Egyptian tradition so that the meanings of mythical symbols could change and multiply over time like the myths themselves.

More ordinary works of art were also designed to evoke mythic themes, like the amulets Egyptians commonly wore to invoke divine powers. The Eye of Horus, for instance, was an overall shape for protective amulets because it represented Horus’ well-being after restoring his lost Eye. Scarab-shaped amulets symbolised the regeneration of life, referring to the god Khepri, the form that the sun god took at dawn.

In literature

Mythology’s themes and motifs frequently appear in Egyptian literature, even outside religious writings. An early instruction text, the “Teaching for King Merykara” from the Middle Kingdom, briefly references a myth of some kind, possibly the Destruction of Humanity. The earliest known Egyptian short story, “Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor”, incorporates ideas about the gods and the eventual dissolution of the world into an account set in the past. Some later stories take much of their plot from mythical events: “Tale of the Two Brothers” adapts parts of the Osiris myth into a fantastic story about ordinary people, and “The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood” transforms the conflict between Horus and Set into an allegory.

Contendings of Horus and Seth

Several texts came from the New Kingdom, and Egyptians wrote many more in the Late and Greco-Roman periods. Although these texts originate more clearly from myths than those mentioned above, they still adopt them for non-religious purposes. A text fragment about the actions of Horus and Set suggests that the stories about gods arose in the Middle Kingdom era.

The variety of ways these stories treat mythology demonstrates the wide range of purposes that myth could serve in Egyptian culture. “The Contendings of Horus and Seth”, from the New Kingdom, tells the story of the conflict between the two gods, often with a humorous and seemingly irreverent tone. The Roman-era “Myth of the Eye of the Sun” incorporates fables into a framing story taken from myth. The goals of written fiction could also affect the narratives in magical texts, as with the New Kingdom story “Isis, the Rich Woman’s Son, and the Fisherman’s Wife”, which conveys a moral message unconnected to its magical purpose.