Egyptian Mythology List

Unas is the ninth and last king of Egypt's Fifth Dynasty, remembered less for military conquest than for the revolution he carried into the royal tomb. He is the Old Kingdom pharaoh whose pyramid at Saqqara first carried the incised utterances now called the Pyramid Texts. He is the ruler whose causeway reliefs preserve rare scenes of ships returning from the Levant, Bedouins attacked on the eastern frontier, workers transporting Aswan granite and starving people seeking aid. He is the king whose burial chamber transformed him into both Osiris, renewed beneath the earth, and Ra, risen into the solar sky. He is the figure behind the so-called Cannibal Hymn, in which Unas eats the gods, swallows magic and rises as the power above powers. He is the probable son or chosen successor of Djedkare Isesi, whose transition to Teti opened the Sixth Dynasty while continuing much of the Fifth Dynasty's court structure. He is the pharaoh whose historical record is thin yet whose tomb became one of the most important religious archives ever discovered. And he is the king whose afterlife was written onto limestone, making him not only the owner of a pyramid but the earliest surviving authorial centre of Egyptian funerary literature.

The uraeus is the stylised, upright Egyptian cobra - Naja haje - worn on the brow of the pharaoh's crown as the pre-eminent symbol of sovereignty, divine authority, and protective power in ancient Egypt. Its Egyptian name, iꜣrt, means "the one who rears up," describing the characteristic defensive posture of the hooded cobra poised to strike. The uraeus was far more than ornament: it was understood as an active protective force, capable of spitting divine fire at the king's enemies and annihilating threats to cosmic order.

The uraeus represents the goddess Wadjet (wꜣḏyt), the tutelary deity of Lower Egypt and patron goddess of the Nile Delta, whose primary cult centre was at Buto (Per-Wadjet). As one of the "Two Ladies" (together with Nekhbet the vulture goddess of Upper Egypt), Wadjet embodied the protective power of the northern realm, and her cobra form became the visual signature of unified kingship.

The Valley of the Queens is the Theban cemetery where royal relatives and members of the court were buried across generations of the New Kingdom. Its modern name draws attention to queens, but its history also includes princesses, princes and officials. Known in ancient Egyptian as Ta-Set-Neferu, often translated as the Place of Beauty, it lies among the desert valleys on the west bank of the Nile near modern Luxor. Its best-known monument is QV66, the painted tomb of Nefertari, Great Royal Wife of Ramesses II. Other tombs preserve the names and images of royal children, including sons of Ramesses III. The cemetery is also a landscape of later reuse, excavation and conservation, where fragile plaster and paint require as much attention as the rock-cut chambers themselves. Its history is not a simple sequence of queens' graves, but a changing record of who received a place in the royal funerary landscape.

Wadjet is the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, the rearing serpent who coiled upon the brow of every pharaoh and spat fire and poison at his enemies. She is one of the Two Ladies, the pair of goddesses who together embodied the united kingdom: Wadjet the cobra of the Delta and Nekhbet the vulture of the Nile valley, whose twin names were carved into the royal titulary of every king. She is the Fiery Eye of the sun god Ra, the blazing serpent power that defended the solar barque on its nightly voyage and burned the enemies of the gods to ash. She is the guardian of the infant Horus, who was hidden in the papyrus marshes of the Delta to escape Seth, the red god of chaos who had murdered his father. She is the Green One, the goddess of the papyrus country, whose sanctuary at Buto held one of the most famous oracles in the ancient world. And she is the oldest symbol of Egyptian kingship, the cobra on the crown, which endured for three thousand years.

The Was Sceptre is the most enduring symbol of power in ancient Egypt, the staff that gods and pharaohs carried for more than three thousand years as proof that they held dominion over chaos and preserved the cosmic order called ma'at. It is the sceptre whose very name, was, is the Egyptian hieroglyph for power and dominion, a word that appears in royal names and titles from the First Dynasty to the Roman period. It is the staff with the forked base that some scholars believe was originally a dried bull's penis, a visceral symbol of masculine potency transformed by millennia of ritual use into an emblem of divine authority. It is the sceptre held by Osiris, the god of the afterlife, as he judges the dead; by Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification, as he guides souls through the underworld; by Set, the god of storms and chaos, as he defends the solar barque of Ra against the serpent Apep each night. It is the staff that appears in the Pyramid Texts of King Unas, carved into the walls of his pyramid at Saqqara around 2400 BCE, where the Praise-serpent is said to rest upon its sceptre and the king is promised that his Was shall be at the head of the living. And it is the sceptre that, together with the ankh of life and the djed pillar of stability, forms the sacred trinity of Egyptian symbols, the three emblems that framed every temple relief and adorned every royal tomb, telling the illiterate farmer in the fields and the embalmed king in his sarcophagus the same story: that power, life, and stability are the foundations of the ordered world.

Wepwawet is the Opener of the Ways, one of the oldest gods ever worshipped in Egypt, a jackal-headed deity who predates even Anubis at the sacred city of Abydos and whose standard led every royal procession for three thousand years. He is the scout who clears the path for armies, the god who goes before the pharaoh into battle and into the underworld alike, his sharp arrows more powerful than those of any other deity. He is the divine companion of kings on the hunt, running at the side of the royal chariot with his mace and bow, and the guardian who stands at the prow of the sun god Ra's bark as it sails through the night. He is the Lord of Abydos and Lord of the Necropolis, the funerary god who assists at the Opening of the Mouth ceremony and guides the dead through the dangerous paths of the Duat, the Egyptian underworld. He is the wolf of Lycopolis, the city the Greeks called the Town of the Wolf, whose inhabitants revered the canid that drove invaders from their borders. And he is the proof that in Egypt, the oldest gods were often the most enduring, a legacy that outlasted every dynasty that marched beneath his standard.

The Westcar Papyrus is a surviving manuscript of Egyptian wonder-tales built around the court of Khufu, the king later known to Greek writers as Cheops. It preserves a cycle conventionally divided into five stories, although the beginning and end of the roll are incomplete. Within its palace setting, princes recount the marvels of earlier magicians, and one introduces a living sage whose powers can be tested before the king. Here a wax crocodile becomes a dangerous creature, a magician folds back water to recover a lost ornament, and Djedi restores animals while refusing a test that would harm a person. The stories eventually lead away from entertainment at court towards the birth of children destined for kingship. Catalogued in Berlin as P 3033, the physical papyrus belongs to the Second Intermediate Period. Its Old Kingdom characters inhabit a literary past: the manuscript is historical evidence for storytelling, not proof that its magical events occurred.

Yam is the personified Sea of Ugaritic mythology, a divine rival whose struggle with Baal helps define who may rule among the gods. His name means sea, while the paired titles Prince Sea and Judge River connect him with the power of the waters. He is the claimant favoured by El, the senior god of the divine council, and the sender of messengers who demand that Baal be surrendered. He is the opponent whom the storm god overcomes with two weapons made by the craftsman Kothar-wa-Khasis. His defeat is a story of divine kingship, not a historical battle or proof that the physical sea was destroyed. Related sea-conflict traditions also reached Egyptian literature, including the fragmentary Astarte Papyrus. The god should be distinguished from Yam (Kingdom), the historical African land known from Egyptian expeditions: the shared spelling does not make them the same entity.

Yam (Kingdom) is a historical African land known from Egyptian accounts of long-distance travel and exchange beyond the southern frontier. Its ruler and its goods appear in the autobiography of Harkhuf, an official based at Elephantine who travelled there during the Sixth Dynasty. His account describes journeys lasting months, negotiations with local rulers and a return caravan of three hundred donkeys. A royal letter from Pepi II also survives on Harkhuf's tomb, praising the report of a dancer brought from the south and ordering careful protection during the journey to court. The location of Yam remains debated, with proposals involving Nubia and routes farther west through the Sahara. This land must be distinguished from Yam, the personified Sea in Levantine mythology. Its historical importance lies in the connections it reveals between Egypt and neighbouring African societies, not in claims that African history began when an Egyptian scribe wrote its name.