Egyptian Mythology List

Ay is the courtier who became king, the commoner who rose from the stables of the royal chariot corps to the throne of the Two Lands through nothing but political cunning and decades of proximity to power. He is the vizier who served three pharaohs - Akhenaten, the heretic who abandoned the gods of Egypt; Tutankhamun, the boy king who restored them; and possibly the shadowy queen Neferneferuaten who ruled between them - before seizing the crown for himself when the last of them died without an heir. He is the man depicted in Tutankhamun's burial chamber performing the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, the ritual that restored life to the dead king's mummy, a privilege that no successor had ever claimed so explicitly in the tomb of his predecessor. He is the husband of Ankhesenamun, the widow of Tutankhamun and daughter of Akhenaten, a marriage of convenience that lent a veneer of legitimacy to a commoner's coup. He is the pharaoh who built a mortuary temple at Medinet Habu and designated his general Nakhtmin as heir, only to be outmanoeuvred after his death by Horemheb, the commander who erased his name from every monument and smashed his sarcophagus into fragments. And he is the ghost of the Amarna Period, the man who navigated the most radical religious revolution in Egyptian history and survived it, only to be written out of history by the general who succeeded him.

Baal is the Canaanite storm lord who crossed the Sinai and became an Egyptian god, a foreign deity so powerful that the pharaohs of the New Kingdom built him temples and wrote his name with the sacred animal of Seth. He is the master of the sky and lord of violent storms, the god whose voice was the thunder and whose weapon was the lightning bolt that split the cedar trees of Lebanon. He is the deity syncretised with Seth, the red god of chaos and the desert, so completely that scribes wrote Baal's name with the Seth animal determinative and Ramesses II, the great builder pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty, called himself "Seth, great of strength, and Baal himself." He is the hero of the Astarte Papyrus, the Egyptian telling of his battle against Yam, the personified Sea, in which the goddess Astarte strips bare to placate the flood until Seth-Baal arrives to shatter the waves. He is the god who stood at Memphis with his own temple and priesthood, and later at Pi-Ramses, the Delta capital of Ramesses II, where his cult flourished among the Syrian and Canaanite populations of Egypt's eastern frontier. And he is the foreign god who survived in Egyptian memory long enough to be condemned by name in the Hebrew Bible, a deity so formidable that three religions would spend centuries trying to erase him.

Babi is the bull of the baboons, the deified alpha male of the hamadryas baboon whose bloodthirsty nature made him one of the most feared guardians of the Egyptian underworld. He is the god whose erect phallus served as the bolt that opened the double doors of heaven, letting the dead king pass into the sky. He is the devourer who stood beside the Lake of Fire and fed on the entrails of the unrighteous dead after their hearts were weighed against the feather of maat, the goddess of truth. He is the ferryman of the Duat, the shadowy underworld, whose body became the boat and whose phallus became the mast that carried souls across the dark waters. He is the lord of virility who promised the dead that they would retain their sexual potency in the afterlife, with spells that made women available to them day and night. And he is the fierce face in the moon, the Great White One whose ghostly countenance reminded every Egyptian that the dead kings still watched from the night sky.

Bastet is among the most beloved and widely venerated goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon, celebrated as the divine protector of the home, the guardian of women and children, and the patron of fertility, music, dance, and joy. Her most distinctive attribute - the feline head of a domestic cat - represents one of the most fascinating transformations in Egyptian religious history. Originally, Bastet was a fierce lioness-headed warrior goddess known simply as Bast, a solar deity associated with the destructive power of the sun god Ra and the vengeful Eye of Ra. Over the course of millennia, particularly during the Twenty-second Dynasty (c. 945-715 BCE), she underwent a remarkable evolution: from savage lioness to graceful domestic cat, reflecting profound shifts in Egyptian society, warfare, and domestic life. This transformation gave her a dual nature that made her uniquely accessible - both a gentle nurturer and, when provoked, a formidable protector.

The city of Bubastis in the Nile Delta served as the epicenter of Bastet's cult, and her annual festival there was renowned throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Herodotus, the Greek historian who visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE, described the Bastet festival as one of the most lavish celebrations in Egypt, attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who traveled by river barge, playing music, dancing, and drinking wine in joyful abandon. The very name "Bubastis" derives from the Egyptian Per-Bast - "House of Bastet" - underscoring the goddess's identity as a divine guardian of the household and all that it contained. Yet Bastet's protective sphere extended far beyond the physical walls of a house; she safeguarded the secrets of women, presided over childbirth and fertility, and warded off evil spirits and contagious diseases.

The Benben Stone is the most sacred lost object in ancient Egypt, the pointed stone that once stood in the temple of Ra at Heliopolis and marked the exact spot where creation began, the place where the first dry land rose from the primordial waters and the creator god Atum stood upon it to make the world. It is the stone that the Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious texts in the world, describe as the mound upon which Atum arose, the place where the first rays of the sun fell each morning and where the Bennu bird, the heron of rebirth that the Greeks would later call the phoenix, perched and cried out the first sound that broke the silence of the beginning. It is the stone that vanished in antiquity, leaving no trace, yet whose shape inspired every pyramid capstone and every obelisk tip in Egypt for three thousand years, the pointed summit that caught the morning sun and flashed it back across the land like a signal that creation was renewed with every dawn. It is the stone that some scholars believe may have been a meteorite, a fragment of iron fallen from the sky, its conical shape matching the oriented iron meteorites found in deserts around the world. And it is the stone that proves a single lost object can shape a civilisation more completely than any object that survives, for the Benben disappeared but the idea behind it built the pyramids.

The Bennu bird is the Phoenix of Heliopolis, the original firebird from which every later legend of rebirth was born. It is the heron-like deity whose cry marked the beginning of time itself, the first sound that broke the silence of the primordial waters and set the cosmos in motion. It is the soul of Ra, the supreme sun god, the ba that flew with him through the hours of night and perched upon the benben stone, the primordial mound that rose from the dark abyss of Nun to become the first dry land. It is the self-created one who needed no mother or father, born like Atum from the chaos that existed before creation, and who embodied the eternal cycle of death and renewal that the Egyptians saw in every sunrise and every Nile flood. It is the bird that Herodotus, the Greek historian who visited Egypt in the fifth century BCE, called the phoenix, describing it as a rare eagle-like creature that returned to Heliopolis every five hundred years bearing its father's body in an egg of myrrh. And it is the eternal ancestor of the Greek phoenix, the Roman phoenix, and every modern story of a bird that rises from ashes, a legacy that began not in fire but in the cool waters of the Nile.

Bes is the ugly dwarf god who guarded the households of ancient Egypt, the bandy-legged protector who danced and pulled faces to frighten demons away from mothers in childbirth and their newborn babies. He is the only Egyptian god ever shown face-on to the viewer, grinning from beneath his crown of feathers with his tongue lolling out and a lion's mane framing his ugly head. He is the god with no great temple and no priesthood, the deity of the people, whose face grinned from headrests, mirrors, cosmetic jars, and tambourines in every home in the land. He is the divine jester who attended the births of pharaohs, slashing the air with knives to cut down the evil spirits that came for royal infants. He is the god whose image travelled further than almost any other in Egypt, carried by soldiers and traders from Spain to Persia. And he is the proof that the Egyptians, for all their solemn temples, loved a god who made them laugh.

Beset is the female Bes, the nude guardian goddess who danced beside her male counterpart in the incubation chambers of Saqqara, where pilgrims slept on mud-plaster beds painted with her image and prayed for erotic dreams that would cure their barren wombs and limp bodies. She is the leonine dwarf of the Middle Kingdom, the earliest figurines of whom show a woman with a cat's head, heavy breasts, and a tail, striding forth to scare demons from the birthing chamber centuries before the Greeks ever set foot in Egypt. She is the Ptolemaic goddess who replaced Taweret as the consort of Bes, the hippo goddess of childbirth set aside so that the dwarf god could have a wife who looked like himself. She is the deity invoked in rituals to drive out ghosts, witchcraft, and every supernatural evil that crept through the door at midnight. She is the goddess whose worship travelled across the sea to Minoan Crete, where her female form proved more popular than her male partner's. And she is the forgotten half of Egypt's most beloved protective pair, the woman behind the dwarf whose face still grins from a thousand amulets while hers has been buried under Saqqaran sand.

The Book of Thoth is the most dangerous book in ancient Egyptian legend, the volume written by the ibis-headed god of wisdom himself and hidden at the bottom of the Nile because its contents were too terrible for any mortal to possess. It is the book that contained two spells: one that allowed the reader to understand the speech of every bird in the sky, every fish in the deep, and every beast on the earth, and another that allowed the reader to see the gods themselves, to behold the sun god Ra rising in the sky with his Ennead, the nine gods of Heliopolis, and the Moon in its form of rising, even from the depths of the underworld. It is the book that the prince Naneferkaptah, son of Pharaoh Mernebptah, retrieved from six nested boxes at the bottom of the Nile near Coptos, fighting through serpents and scorpions and an eternal serpent to reach it, only to lose his wife, his son, and his own life to the curse that Thoth laid upon the thief. It is the book that the ghost of Naneferkaptah guarded in his tomb for generations, until Setne Khamwas, the real-life son of Ramesses the Great who became in legend the greatest magician of Egypt, broke into the tomb and stole it, only to suffer an illusion so humiliating that he returned the book and sealed the tomb forever. And it is the book that proves the oldest lesson in mythology: that the gods' knowledge is not meant for humans, and that the man who reaches for heaven with both hands usually loses everything he already holds.

The Book of the Dead is the guidebook that every Egyptian hoped to carry into the grave, a scroll of some two hundred spells that promised to steer a soul through the perils of the underworld and into paradise. It is the book of the Negative Confession, the forty-two denials of sin spoken before the tribunal of the gods: I have not stolen, I have not killed, I have not made anyone weep. It is the book of the Weighing of the Heart, the most famous scene in all Egyptian art, where the jackal-headed god Anubis balances a human heart against a feather while a monster waits to devour the guilty. It is not one book at all but a family of scrolls, no two alike, each made to order by priestly workshops that left blank spaces for the buyer's name. It is the descendant of the oldest religious writings on earth, the Pyramid Texts carved for kings and the Coffin Texts painted for nobles, carried down at last onto papyrus for anyone who could pay. And it is the ancestor of every image of the Egyptian afterlife ever filmed, painted, or printed, the source of the scales, the feather, and the green-faced judge who decides who lives forever.

The Bucheum is the burial ground of the sacred Buchis bulls at Armant, the ancient city of Hermonthis near Thebes. These animals were associated with Montu and received elaborate funerary treatment as manifestations of divine power. Their tombs and commemorative stelae preserve the meeting of religious belief, local identity and royal patronage across the Late, Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Nearby, a separate cemetery known as the Baqaria held the bulls' mothers. Together, the sites recall centuries in which the care of sacred cattle expressed enduring relationships between a god, a community and the rulers of Egypt.

Buchis is the sacred bull of Montu, the falcon-headed war god of Upper Egypt, a living animal so holy that his birth was hailed as the incarnation of a god and his death was mourned like the passing of a pharaoh. He is the white bull with the black face who was chosen by priests from the herds of the Theban nome, the animal whose coat was said by the Roman author Macrobius to change colour every hour of the day like the sun itself. He is the oracle who delivered prophecies to pilgrims and the warrior who fought other bulls in the arena, channelling the battle-fury of the god he embodied. He is the deity whose underground tomb, the Bucheum at Hermonthis, held the mummified bodies of dozens of bulls and their mothers, each burial marked by a painted stela that recorded the bull's lifespan down to the day. He is the last of Egypt's great sacred bulls to die, his final stela dated to 340 CE, long after the temples of Amun had fallen silent and the pharaohs had become Roman emperors. And he is the forgotten cousin of the Apis bull, the sacred animal of Ptah at Memphis whose fame eclipsed every other holy beast in Egypt, yet whose own cult outlived the empire that had created it.