COLLECTION
Explore the stories, beliefs, and extraordinary beings of this tradition.
His name meant "the hidden one", yet Amun of Thebes became king of the gods, the divine father of pharaohs and, for the Greeks, the Zeus Ammon whose desert oracle greeted Alexander as a son. One pharaoh had his name cut out of the temples, and a boy king put it back.
Read story 10 min readFor more than a thousand years Bastet was a lioness who nursed and guarded the king, and only later the cat goddess of Bubastis. Her festival filled the Nile with boats, and her temples filled with mummified cats.
Read story 10 min readWhen people plotted against the ageing sun god, he sent his Eye against them, and she became Sekhmet, the Powerful One. To save the rest of humankind, Ra flooded the fields at night with seven thousand jars of beer coloured red like blood.
Read story 10 min readNo text from the age of the pyramids says who carved the Great Sphinx or what it was called. More than a thousand years later, a prince dreamed in its shadow that the god would make him king if he freed it from the sand.
Read story 12 min readAnubis kept watch over Egypt's cemeteries from the desert hill and wrapped the dead in linen, and Egyptians carved his name on their tombs in the prayer for a good burial. Yet few texts tell his deeds, and the only story that bears his name is a folk tale about two brothers.
Read story 12 min readRa left Thoth in his place in the night sky, and the Egyptians made the ibis-headed god the scribe of the gods. A Ptolemaic tale tells what became of the prince who stole the book Thoth wrote with his own hand.
Read story 11 min readIn the Hall of the Two Truths the dead denied forty-two sins, one before each judge, and watched their heart weighed against the feather of Maat while a monster waited. The papyri buried with them show the beam level: the heart had to balance, not to be light.
Read story 11 min readBefore there was sky or earth, Atum stood alone on the first mound in the waters of Nun, and from him came the nine gods of Heliopolis. The Egyptians told it in pieces, in spells written down over two thousand years, and other temples told the beginning in other ways.
Read story 9 min readFor eighty years the gods argued over who should inherit the throne of Osiris: his son Horus or his brother Seth. The only full telling, a papyrus of the 12th century BCE, plays the lawsuit as a comedy of tricks, sulks and letters.
Read story 11 min readIsis made a serpent from the old sun god's spittle and would heal him only for his secret name, and she drove the scorpions' poison out of a stranger's child and out of her own. The spells that tell these stories were recited over the sick, and her worship spread from the Nile to Rome.
Read story 12 min readEvery night the sun sailed through the twelve hours of the underworld, and every night the serpent Apophis lay across its path. The spells told him he would never rise again, then ordered the same rite again for the next day.
Read story 8 min readSeth shut his brother in a chest, Isis searched for him across the world, and Osiris became the king and judge of the dead. Yet no Egyptian text tells the whole story. The fullest telling we have is Greek.
Read story 6 min read
