Egyptian Mythology List

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.

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.

Canopic jars were the sacred vessels used in Egyptian mummification to store and preserve the internal organs of the deceased. The ancient Egyptians did not use a single term equivalent to "canopic jar" - their vessels were called qebu (qAbw) or referred to by function. The modern name is itself a historical misnomer: European Egyptologists borrowed the name from Greek mythology, where Canopus was a sailor in the crew of Menelaus who died near Aboukir in the Nile Delta. The Egyptians worshipped him there in the form of a human-headed vessel, which early scholars mistakenly associated with the funerary jars.

Each canopic jar was guarded by one of the Four Sons of Horus - Imsety (human head), Hapy (baboon head), Duamutef (jackal head), and Qebehsenuef (falcon head). These divine protectors ensured the organs' safety and stood before Osiris in judgment. The jars were essential to Egyptian afterlife belief: the deceased would need a complete physical form to function in the next world, and the canopic jars guaranteed that every part of the body was accounted for and protected.

Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and the final pharaoh of ancient Egypt before its annexation by Rome in 30 BCE. She occupies a unique position in history - simultaneously a documented historical figure and a cultural icon whose image has been shaped by Roman propaganda, Shakespearean drama, Hollywood cinema, and modern scholarship. She was the first Ptolemaic ruler to learn the Egyptian language, and she presented herself as the living incarnation of Isis, the goddess of magic, motherhood, and queenship.

Her twenty-one-year reign represents the final act of three thousand years of pharaonic civilization - the last time an Egyptian monarch would rule from the Nile, the last time the double crown was worn, and the last time the crook and flail would be wielded by a sovereign of Egypt. Plutarch, the primary ancient biographer of Cleopatra, wrote that her actual beauty "was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her," but her intellect, wit, charm, and eloquence made her presence "irresistible." Coins from her reign depict her with prominent features characteristic of Macedonian Greek aristocracy - realistic portrayals rather than idealized beauty.

The criosphinx is the Egyptian sphinx with the head of a ram, distinguished from the human-headed androsphinx and the hawk-headed hieracosphinx. The term was coined by Greek historians - notably Herodotus - to classify the ram-headed lion-bodied creatures they encountered in Egypt. The criosphinx was specifically associated with the god Amun, whose sacred animal was the ram with curved horns, and it served as a powerful emblem of Amun's authority and fertility.

The most famous assemblage of criosphinxes is the Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak Temple - the western approach known to the ancient Egyptians as "The Way of the Rams." Here, dozens of criosphinx statues originally lined the processional route leading to the temple's first pylon, each bearing a small statue of the reigning pharaoh between its paws.

The Djed Pillar is the oldest symbol of stability in Egypt, the crossbarred column that stood for everything that endures: the spine, the tree, the kingdom, and the god who rose from the dead. It is the backbone of Osiris, the murdered and resurrected lord of the underworld, whose body was believed to stand upright again wherever the pillar was raised. It is the centrepiece of one of Egypt's greatest ceremonies, the Raising of the Djed, when the pharaoh himself hauled a great wooden column upright with ropes to proclaim that the land was stable and the god lived. It is the palace pillar of Byblos, the tree that grew around the coffin of Osiris on a foreign shore and became a column in a king's hall. It is the golden amulet laid at the throat of every mummy so the dead would rise with the god's own spine. And it is the partner of the knot of Isis, the two signs of the divine couple that guarded Egypt for three thousand years.

The Duat is the underworld of ancient Egypt, the vast hidden realm beneath the earth and within the night sky where the dead go and the sun itself travels every night. It is the kingdom of Osiris, the murdered and risen god who rules the dead from his hall of judgement, where every human heart is weighed against the feather of truth. It is the road of twelve hours and twelve gates, the path the sun god Ra sails each night in his barque, fighting the chaos serpent Apep in the dark so that dawn can come. It holds both paradise and annihilation: the Field of Reeds, the green mirror of Egypt where the blessed live forever, and the Lake of Fire, where the damned are burned, beheaded, and erased. It is the place where the sun god merges with the corpse of Osiris at the deepest hour of night and is reborn as the scarab of dawn. And it is the best mapped afterlife of the ancient world, for the Egyptians painted its guidebooks on the walls of their royal tombs.

The Eye of Horus is the most famous amulet of ancient Egypt, the painted and carved eye that protected the living, healed the sick, and watched over the dead for three thousand years. It is the eye that was torn from the face of the falcon god Horus by Seth, the red god of chaos, during their battle for the throne of Egypt, and made whole again by Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom. Its name, wedjat, means the Whole One, for the amulet celebrates not the wound but the healing. It is the eye that Horus gave to his murdered father Osiris, the lord of the dead, to revive him, which is why every offering of bread, beer, and incense in Egypt was called by its name. It is a piece of practical mathematics, its six parts used by scribes as fractions to measure grain. And it is the eye painted on the bows of boats so the vessel could see its way safely, a tradition that survives on Mediterranean fishing boats to this day.

The Eye of Ra is the blazing female power of the sun, the daughter and enforcer of the sun god Ra, sent out from his forehead to do his will in the world. She is the destroyer of mankind, the lioness goddess Sekhmet who nearly wiped out the human race in a hurricane of slaughter and was only stopped by seven thousand jars of blood-red beer. She is the Distant Goddess, the furious lioness who quarrelled with her father and fled to the deserts of Nubia, leaving Egypt to parch until wisdom coaxed her home. She is the guardian of the solar barque, the cobra of flame who spits venom into the eyes of the chaos serpent Apep every night as the sun sails through the underworld. She wears many names and faces, Sekhmet, Hathor, Tefnut, Wadjet, Bastet, Mut, for every fierce goddess of Egypt is one of her forms. And she is the rearing cobra on the crown of every pharaoh, the fire that never sleeps.

The Field of Reeds is the Egyptian heaven, the paradise where the justified dead lived forever in a perfect Egypt of green fields, full canals, and wheat that grew seven cubits tall, twice the height of a man. It is the destination of every soul that passed the Weighing of the Heart, the judgment where the heart was balanced against the feather of truth, ruled over by Osiris, the green-skinned king of the dead. It is the mirror of the Nile valley at its best, where the blessed ploughed and sowed and reaped, feasted, sailed, and played senet, the board game of the afterlife, in a land that never knew drought or debt. It is the heaven with servants, for every Egyptian took small statues called shabtis into the grave to answer for them when labour was called, so that eternity could be spent in leisure. It is the paradise that had to be earned twice, once by a blameless heart and once by the passwords and spells that opened its demon-guarded gates. And it is the oldest fully pictured heaven in human religion, the green original from which every later paradise, Elysian or otherwise, borrowed its colour.

Geb is the earth itself, the solid ground of Egypt made into a god, the brown and green body on which everything that lives was built. He is the husband of the sky, the brother of Nut, torn away from her by their own father and left lying forever beneath her, still reaching upward after three thousand years. He is the laughing god, for the Egyptians heard the earthquakes as Geb's laughter rumbling through the land, and he is the Great Cackler, the primeval goose whose honk first broke the silence of creation and whose egg hatched the sun. He is the father of the five greatest gods of Egypt, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, and Horus the Elder, and the first true king to rule the land, who judged the terrible quarrel between his son Set and his grandson Horus and divided Egypt between them. And he is the god whose throne every pharaoh inherited, for the kings of Egypt did not call their seat the throne of any other god: for three thousand years they sat, by their own proud formula, upon the throne of Geb.

Hapi is the god of the inundation, the annual miracle of the rising Nile that turned a rainless desert valley into the most fertile farmland on earth, the bringer of water and black silt without which Egypt simply did not exist. He is the plump, blue-skinned figure of abundance, his body heavy-breasted and full-bellied like a woman great with child, his head crowned with the papyrus of the north or the lotus of the south, for he belonged to both lands at once. He is the paired giant who kneels at the base of every pharaoh's throne, tying the plants of Upper and Lower Egypt into a single knot, the binding of the Two Lands. He is the god who rose each summer from the hidden caverns of Qerti at the First Cataract, measured cubit by cubit on the Nilometers, too little meaning famine and too much meaning ruin. He is the flood heralded by the star Sirius and by the tear that Isis, the queen of magic, let fall into the river for her murdered husband. He is the god no temple could hold and no myth could trap, because his myth was the year itself. And he is the grandfather of every river god ever carved, from the Nile-god statues of Rome to the river spirits of every land fed by a flood.