Egyptian Mythology List

Serapis is the god Ptolemy I Soter invented to rule the world, a deity so cleverly stitched together from Greek and Egyptian parts that both peoples could worship him without feeling they had abandoned their own gods. He is the fusion of Osiris, the green-skinned murdered king of the Egyptian underworld who was resurrected by his wife Isis, and Apis, the sacred black bull of Memphis whose mummified bodies were buried in the Serapeum at Saqqara. He is the statue that Ptolemy saw in a dream, the colossal image of an unknown god commanding him to bring it from Sinope on the Black Sea to Alexandria, where the Greek hierophant Timotheus and the Egyptian priest Manetho pronounced it Serapis. He is the bearded sovereign enthroned in the great Serapeum of Alexandria, wearing a modius - a grain basket - on his head as a symbol of fertility and death, with Cerberus, the three-headed hound of the Greek underworld, resting at his feet. He is the god who spread across the Roman Empire, from the Iseum Campense in Rome to the slopes of Acrocorinth, replacing Osiris as the consort of Isis in every temple outside Egypt. He is the deity whom the emperor Vespasian credited with a miracle at Alexandria in 70 CE, and whom the Christian patriarch Theophilus smashed with an axe in 391 CE, burning his wooden torso in the amphitheatre as a final act of contempt. And he is the last great god of pagan antiquity, the deity whose destruction marked the end of Egypt's three-thousand-year religious tradition.

Serket is the scorpion goddess whose name means "she who causes the throat to breathe," one of the oldest deities ever worshipped in Egypt, her power invoked against the venomous creatures that lurked in every shadow of the Nile Delta. She is the protector of Qebehsenuef, the falcon-headed son of Horus who guards the intestines of the dead, one of the four goddesses who stand eternal watch over the canopic jars that hold the organs of mummified kings. She is the divine midwife who stood beside Isis, the goddess of magic and motherhood, when the infant Horus was born in the marshes of the delta, sending seven scorpions to guard mother and child from the deadly creatures that Set, the red-haired god of chaos, sent against them. She is the guardian of the sun god Ra's night-bark, standing watch against the serpent Apep, the demon of chaos who attacks the sun boat each night through the twelve hours of darkness. She is the golden statue that kneels in eternal protection beside the canopic shrine of Tutankhamun, her arms outstretched in the same gesture she has held for six thousand years. And she is the proof that the most feared creature in Egypt could become the most trusted protector, a legacy that outlasted every dynasty.

The Serpent King is the great prophetic serpent who rules the enchanted island in The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the oldest surviving ancient Egyptian story. Unnamed in the papyrus, he appears as a thirty-cubit serpent whose body is overlaid with gold, whose beard is more than two cubits long, and whose eyebrows are true lapis lazuli. He first terrifies the lone castaway with questions and a threat of destruction, yet then carries him unharmed, reassures him and foretells the ship that will return him safely to Egypt. The serpent also shares his own loss: he once lived among a family of seventy-five serpents, but a falling star destroyed the others while he was away. He is both ruler and counsellor, a being with divine attributes who commands an island rich in food, perfume and precious goods. Before the sailor leaves, the serpent warns that the island will become water and never be seen again, turning the encounter into one of Egyptian literature's earliest stories of survival, wonder and memory.

The serpopard is a modern scholarly term - a portmanteau of "serpent" and "leopard" - coined to describe a composite creature depicted in Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian art. The creature possesses the body of a leopard or lioness combined with an extraordinarily elongated, serpentine neck. No ancient Egyptian name for this creature has survived; all references to it are inferred from visual representations on ceremonial objects.

The serpopard's most famous appearance is on the Narmer Palette (c. 3100 BCE), one of the earliest and most significant historical artefacts from ancient Egypt. Here, two serpopards with intertwining necks frame the central cosmetic-grinding recess, held on leashes by attendants. The Narmer Palette, discovered in 1897-98 at Hierakonpolis in the Temple of Horus, is widely interpreted as commemorating the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under King Narmer.

Seshat is the goddess who invented writing, the divine scribe whose name simply means "the Female Scribe" and whose seven-pointed emblem has hovered above the heads of pharaohs for five thousand years. She is the Mistress of the House of Books, the patroness of the Per Ankh, the temple scriptorium where every sacred text, spell, and medical remedy was copied and preserved for eternity. She is the Lady of Builders who performed the stretching of the cord ritual with every king from Khasekhemwy of the Second Dynasty to the Ptolemies, aligning the foundations of every temple to the stars with a mason's line and a notched stick. She is the recorder of royal names who wrote the king's titulary upon the leaves of the sacred persea tree at Heliopolis and notched his regnal years upon a palm rib to ensure his reign would last forever. She is the divine accountant who counted the spoils of foreign campaigns, tallied the cattle of Egypt, and measured the boundaries of the land after each Nile flood. And she is the proof that in a world of warriors and kings, the one who holds the pen holds the power, a legacy that outlasted every sword ever forged.

Set is the Egyptian god of chaos who murdered his own brother, the storm-lord who cut the good king Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered him across the land. He is the rival who fought his nephew Horus for the throne of Egypt in a lawsuit and a war that dragged on for eighty years, tearing out the falcon god's eyes and losing his own testicles in the struggle. He is the strongest of the gods, the only one mighty enough to stand at the prow of the sun god's night barque and spear Apophis, the great serpent that tries to swallow creation before every dawn. He is the master of the red desert, of thunder and foreigners, and his sacred creature is a square-eared, fork-tailed beast that no one has ever identified. He is the patron of invading shepherd kings and of warrior pharaohs like Seti I, whose name means Man of Set. And he is the god that Egypt finally turned against, his statues smashed and his name chiselled from stone, until the Greeks knew him only as Typhon, the father of monsters.

Setne Khamwas is the learned prince of Egyptian ghost stories, a seeker of sacred books whose knowledge does not always protect him from his own desires. His literary identity draws on Khaemwaset, a real son of Ramesses II and high priest of Ptah at Memphis, remembered for inscriptions on much older monuments. In the later Demotic tales, that princely scholar becomes a magician who enters a dead man's tomb, takes the Book of Thoth and discovers that possessing knowledge is not the same as using it wisely. Another story gives him a remarkable son, Si-Osire, who reveals the judgement of the dead and answers a challenge to Egypt's magicians. History supplied a name and a reputation; the storytellers made them the centre of adventures about learning, responsibility and the limits of human power.

The sha - universally known as the Set Animal or Typhonian Beast - is the mysterious caniform creature that served as the totem and hieroglyphic emblem of the god Set. Unlike every other major deity in the Egyptian pantheon, whose sacred animals were readily identifiable real species (Horus the falcon, Thoth the ibis, Sobek the crocodile), Set was associated with a creature that does not match any known animal, living or extinct. This anomaly has made the sha one of the most debated puzzles in Egyptology.

The sha is depicted with a distinctive anatomy: a downward-curving snout, large square-tipped ears, an upright or bristling tail that terminates in a fork, and a lean, greyhound-like body with long legs. Its forked tail bears a resemblance to the was-sceptre, a symbol of power and authority. In the earliest Predynastic representations from the Naqada culture, the sha appears alongside standards and on pottery, suggesting it was a totemic emblem even before Set's full theological elaboration.

Shabaka is the Kushite pharaoh who transformed the military conquests of Piye into a permanent Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and reunited Egypt under a Nubian-born king. He is the son of Kashta and the brother or close dynastic successor of Piye, whose campaigns had brought Upper Egypt under Kushite control but had left the Delta to local rulers. He is the ruler who returned north, defeated the Twenty-Fourth Dynasty and established effective royal authority from Memphis, Egypt's ancient capital of coronation and the city of Ptah. He is the king whose reign joined Egypt and Kush in a single ideological state, treating the Nile Valley as one sacred and political whole. He is the patron of a major temple-building programme at Memphis, Thebes, Esna, Abydos, Karnak and Luxor, where Kushite architecture revived and reinterpreted ancient Egyptian forms. He is the pharaoh who adopted the throne name Neferkare, recalling the long-reigning Sixth Dynasty king Pepi II and linking the new dynasty to the Old Kingdom. He is the figure behind the Shabaka Stone, whose colophon claims that he found a worm-eaten work of the ancestors in the Temple of Ptah and copied it anew so that it would last forever. He is the ruler whose exact chronology is now debated, because new Assyrian, Theban and architectural evidence has reversed the older order that placed him before Shabataka. He is remembered by Herodotus as Sabacos, by Manetho under Greek names and by modern scholarship as one of the great Kushite restorers of Egypt. And he is the king whose monument made the theology of Ptah's creative heart and tongue one of the most important surviving documents of Egyptian thought.

Shu is the god of air who tore the sky and the earth apart with his own hands, thrusting himself between the entwined lovers Geb and Nut and holding the heavens above his head for all eternity. He is the firstborn of Atum, the self-created god who sneezed him into existence at the dawn of time, and the twin of Tefnut, the goddess of moisture. He is the father of Geb the earth and Nut the sky, and therefore the grandfather of Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys, the four most famous gods of Egypt. He is the bearer of the ostrich feather, the emblem of maat, the divine order against which every human heart would one day be weighed. He is the breath of life itself, the wind that fills the lungs of the living and revives the dead in the afterlife. And he is the god with no great temple, because he needs none: the air in every room of Egypt was his house.

Sneferu is the Egyptian king whose building programme helped transform stepped royal tombs into the smooth-sided pyramids associated with the Old Kingdom. The founder of the Fourth Dynasty and father of Khufu, he is connected with three great monuments: the altered pyramid at Meidum, the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid at Dahshur. Their different forms preserve the decisions and adjustments of builders working on an unprecedented scale. Royal annals also remember expeditions, ships and resources, while much later stories place the king in a palace world of leisure and magic. Those tales are part of his literary afterlife, not direct evidence of his personality. His most substantial record remains in stone: a series of monumental projects that helped prepare the way for the pyramid age at Giza.

Sobek is the crocodile god of Egypt, the living terror of the Nile raised to divinity, the deity of the water's danger and the water's gift. He is the lord of the Faiyum, the vast green lake country west of the Nile, where his city of Shedet was so full of sacred crocodiles that the Greeks called it Crocodilopolis, the crocodile city, and where travellers marvelled at a tame temple crocodile that wore earrings of gold and crystal and took cakes and wine from the hands of tourists. He is the son of Neith, the ancient goddess of war and the loom, and the power that kings invoked for strength, whose name was carried by a dynasty of Sobekhotep pharaohs and by Sobekneferu, the first woman to rule Egypt as a full king. He is the god of the double temple of Kom Ombo, the only sanctuary in Egypt built for two gods at once, which he shared with Horus the Elder. And he is the patron of thousands upon thousands of mummified crocodiles, from hatchlings the length of a finger to ancient monsters, wrapped in linen and buried with the honours of princes.