Egyptian Mythology List

Apis is the sacred bull of Memphis, the living god who walked the streets of Egypt for three thousand years, a black beast with a white diamond blazing upon its forehead that the Egyptians believed was the very soul of Ptah, the divine artificer who shaped the world on his heavenly potter's wheel. He is the oracle whose every movement was read as prophecy, whose stamp of the hoof or toss of the head decided the fate of armies and the fortune of merchants. He is the divine king who lived in a palace of his own, served by priests, fed on the finest grain, and given his choice of cows from the royal herds. He is the god who died like a pharaoh, mourned by the entire nation for seventy days, mummified with royal honours, and entombed in a granite sarcophagus weighing seventy tons beneath the desert at Saqqara. He is the creature who became Serapis in the Ptolemaic period, a fusion of the Egyptian bull and the Greek Zeus that conquered the Mediterranean world. And he is the proof that in Egypt, a god could be born, live, and die before your eyes, a legacy that outlasted every temple built for stone idols.

The apshait is a malevolent creature of Egyptian funerary theology, appearing in Spell 36 of the Book of the Dead as a flesh-eating beetle or insect that threatens to consume the body of the deceased in the afterlife. Its Egyptian name, transliterated ꜥpšꜣyt, incorporates hieroglyphic determinatives depicting a beetle or insect, underscoring its identity as an entomological threat to postmortem preservation.

In Egyptian belief, the integrity of the physical body was essential for eternal survival. The deceased needed their body to be preserved in order for the ba (soul) and ka (life force) to reunite and achieve resurrection in the Field of Reeds. The apshait represented a direct attack on this necessity - a force of corruption and decay that could destroy the physical vessel upon which immortality depended.

Aten is the sun disk itself, the blazing circle that rises each dawn and sets each evening, the only god ever to rule Egypt alone in a religious revolution that lasted barely seventeen years and changed the ancient world forever. He is the solar disc that Amenhotep III, the pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty who built the temples of Luxor, elevated from a minor aspect of Ra to a force that would one day consume the entire pantheon. He is the sole deity of Akhenaten, the heretic king who changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, abandoned Thebes, and built a new capital called Akhetaten in the desert to worship nothing but the disk. He is the god who speaks through the Great Hymn to the Aten, carved in the tomb of Ay at Amarna, a poem of thirteen columns that praises the disk as creator of all life and giver of every breath. He is the deity who banished idols, closed the old temples, and declared that no image could capture the divine, a theological leap that some have compared to the religions of Moses. And he is the god who vanished as quickly as he rose, erased from memory by the boy king Tutankhamun, who changed his own name from Tutankhaten and restored the old gods, a legacy that outlasted every monument Akhenaten built.

Atum is the primordial creator god who made himself from nothing, the first being to emerge from the dark waters of chaos and stand upon the first dry land at Heliopolis. He is the father of the Ennead, the nine gods of Heliopolis, who created Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture, from his own body to begin the population of the cosmos. He is the setting sun, the aged god who sails through the underworld each night in his night-bark, merging with Ra to become Atum-Ra, the complete cycle of solar power from dawn to dusk. He is the weeping creator whose tears of joy fell upon the primordial mound and became the first human beings. He is the finisher of the world, the god who promised Osiris that one day he would destroy everything he made and return the universe to the watery darkness of Nun, existing thereafter as serpents with the lord of the dead. And he is the eternal patron of kings, the deity who lifted the souls of pharaohs from their pyramids to the imperishable stars, a power that outlasted every dynasty.

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.