Atum

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Atum, the creator god of ancient Egypt, once told Osiris how the universe would end. According to the Coffin Texts, he said that after millions of years only the two of them would remain, both in the form of serpents. That is a startling thing for a creator to say about his own work. Atum was the primordial god from whom all else arose, and he made himself. His children became the ancestors of the other Egyptian deities. He was tied to the evening sun, and to the underworld. This documentary asks what his name meant, and how different priests explained his birth. It asks how he made the first gods, why he mourned them, and how a being so central to Egyptian belief came to be overshadowed.

  1510124

• 2. The Complete One

  ›

  The name Atum is thought to come from the Egyptian verb tm, which means to complete or to finish. The name also appears as Atem, Temu, or Tem, and the Coptic form is Atoum. From that root, scholars read him as the complete one. They also read him as the finisher of the world. At the close of the creative cycle, he returns the world to watery chaos. As the creator, Atum was seen as the progenitor of everything. The deities and the universe were believed to have received his vital force, which the Egyptians called the ka. The oldest religious writings that survive show how seriously this idea was taken.

  12154

• 3. Two Accounts of Birth

  ›

  The Pyramid Texts mention Atum often, which makes him one of the most important and most frequently named deities from the earliest times. In those spells he is sometimes merged with Ra to form Ra-Atum. He appears as both a creator and a father to the king. The same writings do not agree on how Atum himself came to exist. In the Heliopolitan view, he began in an egg floating in the primeval waters and was born during the primordial flood. He then became the source of everything that followed. The priests of Memphis told it differently. They held that the god Ptah created Atum, and that he did so intellectually, through speech and thought. This version is told on the Shabaka Stone. In the Heliopolitan cosmogony, Atum also sat on a mound called the benben, or was identified with the mound itself. Both versions agree that the next act was the making of his children.

  15101246

• 4. Spit, Hand, and Shadow

  ›

  Early myths say that Atum made the god Shu and the goddess Tefnut by spitting them out of his mouth. One text argues against the idea that this happened through saliva and semen, and credits his lips instead. Another writing says the two were birthed by Atum's hand. That same text treats the hand as the title of the god's wife, a link that comes from her Heliopolitan beginnings. The Egyptian word for hand, ḏr.t, is grammatically feminine. Some scholars read the hand in these myths as the female principle inside Atum, and it was identified with goddesses such as Hathor or Iusaaset. Yet other interpretations say he made union with his shadow. In another account, Shu and Tefnut came from his sneeze, or from his semen. Every telling treats the first act of creation as something Atum managed alone.

  15101247

• 5. The Lost Children

  ›

  Atum made his children out of loneliness. He was the first being to emerge from the dark, endless waters that existed before creation, and he was the product of the energy and matter within that chaos. Shu became the god of air, and Tefnut became the goddess of moisture. The brother and sister grew curious about the primeval waters around them. They set out to explore and vanished into the darkness. Atum could not bear the loss. He sent a fiery messenger, the Eye of Ra, to search for them. When the children came back, Atum wept for joy. According to this myth, those tears became the first human beings.

  651510

• 6. The Evening Sun

  ›

  In the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians believed that Atum lifted the soul of a dead king from his pyramid up to the starry heavens. He was also a solar deity, linked to the great sun god Ra. Atum belonged to the evening sun. Ra, or the closely linked god Khepri, governed the sun at morning and midday. Khepri was the young sun god with the head of a scarab, and his name comes from the Egyptian ḫpr, meaning to come into existence. Set against him, the serpentine Atum stood for the time before existence and the time after it. Together, Khepri-Atum covered sunrise and sunset, the whole cycle of morning and evening. The Book of the Dead, still current in the Graeco-Roman period, says the sun god Atum rose from the chaos waters looking like a snake, an animal that renews itself every morning.

  1510124

• 7. Many Faces

  ›

  Artists usually showed Atum in human form, wearing either the divine Tripartite wig or the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. The Double Crown combined white and red, and it tied him to kingship. In the Netherworld Books, he sometimes appears as an old man leaning on a stick, a picture of the aging evening sun. He could also be a serpent, the shape he takes when the creative cycle ends. Less often, he was a mongoose, a lion, a bull, a lizard, or an ape. As a solar deity he might be drawn as a scarab, and as a reference to his origins he could be the primeval mound itself. In the Greco-Roman period, he was sometimes shown as a standing ape holding a bow and arrow.

  1510124

• 8. Worship at Heliopolis

  ›

  The city of Heliopolis, called Annu or Iunu in Egyptian, was the center of Atum's worship. Almost nothing of the city remains today. The one surviving piece is the obelisk of the Temple of Ra-Atum, in Al-Masalla of Al-Matariyyah in Cairo. Senusret I of the Twelfth Dynasty erected it, and it still stands where he placed it. Atum is believed to have been present in Egyptian thought as early as predynastic times. In the Old Kingdom he sat at the center of the belief system, as the pyramid texts show. In the Middle Kingdom, he appears in spells of the Book of the Dead that helped the dead on the journey to the afterlife. In the New Kingdom, the Theban royal high priestesses known as the Divine Adoratrices of Amun acted as the Hand of Atum in temple rituals. Ra later took center stage and Atum was overshadowed, yet worship continued in rituals that tied him closely to the king. Near the Late Period, he was represented by lizards on small reliquaries and amulets.

  1510124