Egyptian mythology

• 1. Introduction

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  Egyptian mythology is the collection of myths from ancient Egypt, stories that explained the actions of the gods and made sense of the world around them. These were not casual tales. They were inseparable from Egyptian religion, woven into hymns, ritual texts, funerary inscriptions, and the carved walls of temples. Yet here is the surprising part: almost none of these sources contains a complete version of any myth. What survives are fragments, allusions, brief mentions scattered across thousands of years of writing and image-making.

  Why did a civilization so obsessed with permanence leave its central stories in pieces? How did Egyptians understand the cosmos, time, and death through myths that contradicted each other? And what happened to those stories as Egypt's long history unfolded, from the earliest pyramid builders to the age of Greek and Roman writers who tried, imperfectly, to record what they saw? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Order Against Chaos

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  Maat, the Egyptian word written m3at, names the fundamental order of the universe in Egyptian belief. It was established at creation and distinguished the organized world from the chaos that both preceded and surrounded it. Every recurring pattern in nature, the daily sunrise, the annual Nile flood, the predictable seasons, expressed maat working as it should.

  The Nile flood in particular shaped how Egyptians experienced time. When it came at the right level, it renewed the soil and made the highly productive farming that sustained Egyptian civilization possible. When it ran too low, famine followed. When it ran too high, crops and buildings were destroyed. The hospitable Nile valley was hemmed in by harsh desert, populated, in Egyptian eyes, by uncivilized enemies of order. Egypt itself was understood as an isolated bubble of stability, perpetually threatened by the chaos that pressed in from every side.

  The pharaoh sat at the center of this system. In mythology, the king is the son of a variety of deities, their designated representative on earth, obligated to maintain order in human society just as the gods do in nature. Myths did not just describe this role abstractly. They provided its rationale. The myths about Osiris and Horus, for instance, made clear that rightful succession to the throne was essential to the sustenance of maat. Mythology, in this sense, provided the ideological basis for the very nature of Egyptian government.

  Foreign peoples and foreign lands fell on the wrong side of this division. Egyptian ideology lumped most foreigners in with the "nine bows", people who threatened pharaonic rule and the stability of maat. For this reason, the actions of the gods in Egyptian myth almost never take place in foreign lands. The gods were deeply tied to their homeland.

• 3. How the World Began

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  Before the world, in Egyptian belief, there was Nun: an infinite, dark, formless, and inert ocean of primordial water. Creation was the emergence of order from that chaos. But the Egyptians never settled on a single account of how this happened. Their creation myths differ so greatly that the deities credited with forming the world vary from one account to the next.

  One tradition centers on the Ogdoad, eight gods who embodied the characteristics of the primordial water itself. Their actions gave rise to the sun, whose birth formed a space of light and dryness within the dark water. The sun rose from the first mound of dry land, a motif likely inspired by the sight of earth mounds emerging as Nile floodwaters receded.

  Anum, a god closely connected with the sun and that primeval mound, is the focus of a creation account dating back at least to the Old Kingdom. He exists within the waters as a potential being, and at the moment of creation he emerges and produces other gods, resulting in the set of nine deities called the Ennead. That group includes Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky, along with other key elements of the world. The Ennead, by extension, stands for all the gods. Its creation represents the unfolding of Atum's unified potential into the many elements of the world.

  The god Ptah, whose cult was centered at Memphis, figures in a more abstract version. An inscription from the Third Intermediate Period, whose text may be considerably older, describes creation as the realization of a concept first developed within the mind of the creator god. The force of heka, or magic, links the creator's original vision with its physical expression. Ptah's myth incorporates older traditions by saying that the Ennead carries out Ptah's creative commands, making Ptah older and greater than the Ennead. Many scholars have read this as a political move by Memphis to assert its god's superiority over the gods of Heliopolis.

  Accounts from the first millennium BC describe humans as springing from tears that Ra-Atum or his feminine aspect, the Eye of Ra, sheds in a moment of distress. Other texts say the god Khnum molds humans from clay. The creation myths, however, are focused primarily on establishing cosmic order, not on the special place of humans within it.

• 4. Ra's Reign and Its End

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  After the world was formed, Ra dwelled on earth as king of gods and humans. Egyptian tradition described this period as the closest thing to a golden age it possessed, the era of stability that later Egyptians constantly sought to recreate. But the stories from Ra's reign are not peaceful. They are stories of conflict, of a king struggling to maintain order against forces that undermine his rule.

  In one cycle of episodes, some of the gods defy Ra's authority. He destroys them with the help of Thoth and Horus the Elder. Even an extension of himself, the Eye of Ra, which can act independently as a goddess, turns against him. She runs away, wandering wild and dangerous in lands outside Egypt, usually Nubia. Weakened by her absence, Ra sends another god, Shu, Thoth, or Anhur depending on the account, to bring her back by force or persuasion. Because the Eye of Ra is associated with the star Sothis, whose heliacal rising signals the start of the Nile flood, her return to Egypt coincides with the life-giving inundation.

  As Ra grows old and weak, humans plot rebellion against him. The myth known as the Destruction of Mankind, related in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, describes what happens next. Ra sends the Eye goddess to punish the rebels. She begins slaying people. Ra, deciding he does not want all of humanity destroyed, has beer dyed red to resemble blood and spreads it across a field. The Eye goddess drinks it, grows drunk, and stops her rampage. Ra then withdraws into the sky, weary of ruling, and begins the daily journey through the heavens and the Duat that will define the rest of time.

  The surviving humans, dismayed, turn on those among them who plotted against Ra. This is the origin, in Egyptian myth, of warfare, death, and the endless human struggle to protect maat from other people. The Osiris myth, the most elaborate of all Egyptian narratives, takes up the story of divine kingship from where Ra's reign leaves off.

• 5. Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set

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  Osiris, associated with both fertility and kingship, is killed by his brother Set, who usurps his position. In some versions of the story, Osiris is actually dismembered and the pieces of his body scattered across Egypt. His sister and wife Isis, with the help of funerary deities including Nephthys and Anubis, finds her husband's body and restores it to wholeness. The process of Osiris' restoration mirrors Egyptian traditions of embalming and burial. Isis then briefly revives Osiris to conceive an heir: the god Horus.

  The next phase concerns Horus' childhood. Isis raises her son in hidden places, shielding him from Set. She is described as the epitome of maternal devotion and a powerful practitioner of healing magic, protecting and healing Horus through episode after episode. Private magical spells from later periods called upon Isis to heal the sick just as she healed Horus, drawing a direct line between myth and everyday ritual practice.

  Horus and Set then compete for the kingship in a struggle that ranges from violent combat to a legal trial before the assembled gods. In one pivotal episode, Set tears out one or both of Horus' eyes, which are later restored by the healing efforts of Thoth or Hathor. Because Horus is a sky god, with one eye equated with the sun and the other with the moon, the destruction and restoration of his eye explains why the moon is less bright than the sun.

  Two different resolutions appear in Egyptian sources. In one, Egypt is divided between the two claimants. In the other, Horus becomes sole ruler. In this second version, Horus performs the funerary rites for his father, his duty as son and heir. Through this service, Osiris receives new life in the Duat and becomes its ruler. Osiris represents regeneration: on earth he is credited with the annual growth of crops, and in the Duat he is involved in the rebirth of the sun and of deceased human souls. The Eye of Horus became one of the most common shapes for protective amulets in Egyptian life, representing the god's well-being after his injury was healed.

• 6. Ra's Nightly Journey

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  At sunset, Ra passes through the akhet, the horizon, in the west. He reaches his peak strength at noon and then ages and weakens as he moves toward evening. By the end of the day he takes the form of Atum, oldest of all things, and in early Egyptian texts he is said to swallow all the other deities at sunrise and spit them out at sunset. They represent the stars, which is why the stars appear at night and seem absent during the day.

  Ra's passage through the Duat, the mysterious region that borders the formlessness of Nun, is described in funerary texts including the Amduat, the Book of Gates, and the Book of Caverns. Although Egyptian texts avoid stating it explicitly, Ra's entry into the Duat is understood as his death. He overcomes numerous obstacles there. The greatest is Apep, a serpent god representing the destructive aspect of disorder, who threatens to destroy the sun god and plunge creation back into chaos. Other deities travel with Ra and help him overcome these challenges. In his passage, Ra also brings light to the Duat, enlivening the blessed dead who dwell there, while his enemies are tormented in dark pits or lakes of fire.

  The key event in the journey is Ra's meeting with Osiris. By the New Kingdom, this meeting had become a complex symbol of the Egyptian understanding of life and time. Osiris, fixed in the Duat, is like a mummified body within its tomb. Ra, endlessly moving, is like the ba, or soul, of a deceased human. When they meet, they merge into a single being. Once Ra unites with Osiris' regenerative power, he continues on his journey with renewed vitality. At dawn, Nut is said to give birth to Ra after having swallowed him, and the sun's rebirth repeats the very first sunrise at the moment of creation. At this moment Ra is depicted as a child or as the scarab beetle god Khepri, both of which symbolize rebirth in Egyptian iconography.

• 7. Sources and Their Limits

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  The Pyramid Texts are the first major written source of Egyptian mythology. These several hundred incantations were inscribed in the interiors of pyramids beginning in the 24th century BC. They were the first Egyptian funerary texts, intended to guide the kings buried inside safely through the afterlife. Many of the incantations allude to myths about creation and the myth of Osiris, and many of the texts are believed to be much older than their first known written copies.

  During the First Intermediate Period, the Pyramid Texts developed into the Coffin Texts, which contained similar material and were made available to non-royals. Later funerary texts, including the Book of the Dead in the New Kingdom and the Books of Breathing from the Late Period, descended from these earlier collections. Greek and Roman writers such as Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch also recorded Egyptian mythology in the last centuries of its existence. Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride contains the longest surviving ancient account of the Osiris myth. These writers' knowledge was limited, however, because they were excluded from many religious practices, and their accounts reflect their own biases.

  Most Egyptians were illiterate. Susanne Bickel argues that an elaborate oral tradition likely transmitted myths through spoken storytelling, which would explain why so many written sources assume the listener already knows the story. That oral tradition has left almost no direct evidence. The result is that modern knowledge of Egyptian myths is patchy: rich in some eras, sparse in others, shaped by what survived and what did not. What is certain is that the surviving sources represent only a fraction of what was once written down.

• 8. Myth's Life in Art and Story

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  Egyptian art rarely arranged mythological scenes in sequence as a narrative. Individual scenes appeared instead, particularly depicting the resurrection of Osiris. In temple design, the central path of the temple axis was likened to the sun god's path across the sky, with the sanctuary at the end representing the place of creation from which he rose. The corridors of tombs were linked with the god's journey through the Duat, and the burial chamber with the tomb of Osiris.

  The pyramid itself may reflect this symbolic thinking. It likely represented the mound of creation and the original sunrise, appropriate for a monument intended to assure the owner's rebirth after death. Scarab-shaped amulets symbolized the regeneration of life, referring to the god Khepri. Both symbol and monument carried the same underlying idea, that death and renewal were part of the same unending cycle.

  Egyptian literature drew on myth for purposes ranging from entertainment to allegory. The Middle Kingdom text the Westcar Papyrus tells an entertaining folktale about the birth of the first three kings of Egypt's Fifth Dynasty, presenting them as the offspring of Ra and a human woman. The New Kingdom story known as the Contendings of Horus and Seth retells the conflict between the two gods, sometimes with a humorous and seemingly irreverent tone. The Tale of the Two Brothers adapts parts of the Osiris myth into a story about ordinary people. The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood transforms the conflict between Horus and Set into an allegory. The Roman-era Myth of the Eye of the Sun incorporates fables into a framing story taken from myth.

  Heike Sternberg and other scholars have argued that Egyptian myths reached their most fully developed state in the Late and Greco-Roman periods, the final centuries before Egypt's ancient religious tradition came to an end.