Ancient Egypt, Manetho, Genesis, History Ancient Egyptian historian agrees with Genesis which says of Peleg that “in his days the earth6 was divided.”.
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These nine gods were grouped together theologically as the Ennead , but the eight lesser gods, and all other things in the world, were ultimately seen as extensions of Atum. The Memphite version of creation centered on Ptah , who was the patron god of craftsmen. As such, he represented the craftsman's ability to envision a finished product, and shape raw materials to create that product.
The Memphite theology said that Ptah created the world in a similar way. By speaking these names, Ptah produced the gods and all other things. The Memphite creation myth coexisted with that of Heliopolis , as Ptah's creative thought and speech were believed to have caused the formation of Atum and the Ennead. Theban theology claimed that Amun was not merely a member of the Ogdoad , but the hidden force behind all things.
There is a conflation of all notions of creation into the personality of Amun , a synthesis which emphasizes how Amun transcends all other deities in his being "beyond the sky and deeper than the underworld". At the same time, however, because he was the ultimate source of creation, all the gods, including the other creators, were in fact merely aspects of Amun. Amun eventually became the supreme god of the Egyptian pantheon because of this belief.
Amun is synonymous with the growth of Thebes as a major religious capital. But it is the columned halls, obelisks, colossal statues, wall-reliefs and hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Theban temples that we look to gain the true impression of Amun's superiority.
Thebes was thought of as the location of the emergence of the primeval mound at the beginning of time. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Creation Myths of the World. Egyptian Legends and Stories. An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. This hill would obviously constitute a form of firmament. In some traditions that hill was Atum, the Heliopolitan Creator deity. In other traditions, Atum appeared at the top of the hill. These two deities gave birth to the male deity Geb, who represented the earth, and the female deity Nut, who represented the heavens. Several Egyptian pictures portray Shu as lifting Nut into the air and separating her from Geb.
Sequentially, then, Atum appears as a firmament in the middle of the Nun and creates Shu who ultimately separates heaven and earth and symbolizes the space in between. Shu, therefore, becomes the firmament between Heaven and Earth. Consider now how Genesis says the waters were divided. First, the waters above were divided from the waters below.
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Next, the waters below were gathered into a single place. We see it most clearly in images of the solar bark sailing through the heavens. Although Genesis says the firmament was called Heaven, I believe this was a late gloss by the biblical redactors. The firmament stands below the waters above. It is the waters above that would correspond to heaven. The firmament would be the space in between heaven and earth, corresponding first to the primeval mountain and then to Shu.
This brings us to the question of where in all the middle east would any people have such a concept as all the waters gathering in a single place, leaving fertile land behind in its retreat. The most logical location is the Nile River in Egypt. The gathering of the waters in one place is the primary Egyptian agricultural phenomenon.
It derives from the annual overflowing of the Nile, which fertilizes the land and then withdraws, leaving the dry land in its place. For Egyptians, the Nile was the one and only great water way. Even the Mediterranean Sea attaches to the Nile. Elsewhere, throughout Canaan and Mesopotamia, there were numerous large unconnected bodies of waters that were well known to the inhabitants of those lands.
It is unlikely that the people of those lands would think of all these waters as gathering in a single place. Returning to Genesis 2: The next Genesis verses in sequence tell us: Observe here 1 Adam appears before the plant life on Day Three and 2 that woman has not yet appeared. This is contrary to the sequence in the seven days of Creation, which places man and woman on the sixth day. This arrangement strongly suggests that the man and woman created on Day Six were other than Adam and Eve, who appear earlier.
The later biblical redactors, unable to conceive of Adam and Eve as deities, thought of them instead as the first humans, and equated them with the man and woman created on Day Six, who actually are the first humans in the Genesis Creation story. Chronologically and contextually, we see that Genesis introduces Adam and Eve as the anthropomorphic beings referred to in Genesis 2: Eve enters the story, however, only after she is physically ripped from the body of Adam.
This separation of Adam the earth from Eve the Heaven closely parallels the Egyptian account in which Shu physically pulls Heaven from the Earth. It also incorporates the Heliopolitan idea that a male and female deity were created from a single male deity. There are some other interesting parallels between Geb and Nut and Adam and Eve. They disobeyed his injunction and were punished.
Egyptian mythology
Re ordered Shu to separate the two bodies and declared that Nut would not be able to give birth on any day of the year. Since these days were not yet part of the year, Nut could give birth on these five days. She had five children, one on each day, born in the following order: Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys, the three males first and then two females. The Egyptians memorialized this sequence in their calendar, which names the last five days of the year after these five deities in the order of their births.
Because of the role of Geb and Nut in birthing these deities, they were often known as the father and mother of the gods. Observe the sequence of events: The chief deity gives a direct command to Heaven and Earth. They violate the order and as a penalty the chief deity makes child birth a difficult act for the female.
Subsequently she gives birth to three sons. As we know from other Egyptian myths, one of those three sons, Set, kills one of the other sons, Osiris. Genesis has a similar plot. God gives Adam and Eve or Earth and Heaven a direct order. The myths were made real every time the events to which they were related occurred. These events were celebrated with rituals, which often evoked myths. Some of the most important categories of myths are described below.
Because of the fragmentary nature of Egyptian myths, there is little indication in Egyptian sources of a chronological sequence of mythical events. Among the most important myths were those describing the creation of the world. The Egyptian developed many accounts of the creation, which differ greatly in the events they describe. In particular, the deities credited with creating the world vary in each account. This difference partly reflects the desire of Egypt's cities and priesthoods to exalt their own patron gods by attributing creation to them.
Yet the differing accounts were not regarded as contradictory; instead, the Egyptians saw the creation process as having many aspects and involving many divine forces. One common feature of the myths is the emergence of the world from the waters of chaos that surround it. This event represents the establishment of maat and the origin of life.
One fragmentary tradition centers on the eight gods of the Ogdoad , who represent the characteristics of the primeval water itself. Their actions give rise to the sun represented in creation myths by various gods, especially Ra , whose birth forms a space of light and dryness within the dark water. With the emergence of the sun god, the establisher of maat , the world has its first ruler.
Atum , a god closely connected with the sun and the primeval mound, is the focus of a creation myth dating back at least to the Old Kingdom. Atum, who incorporates all the elements of the world, exists within the waters as a potential being. At the time of creation he emerges to produce other gods, resulting in a set of nine deities, the Ennead , which includes Geb, Nut, and other key elements of the world.
The Ennead can by extension stand for all the gods, so its creation represents the differentiation of Atum's unified potential being into the multiplicity of elements present within the world. Over time, the Egyptians developed more abstract perspectives on the creation process. By the time of the Coffin Texts , they described the formation of the world as the realization of a concept first developed within the mind of the creator god.
The force of heka , or magic, which links things in the divine realm and things in the physical world, is the power that links the creator's original concept with its physical realization. Heka itself can be personified as a god, but this intellectual process of creation is not associated with that god alone. An inscription from the Third Intermediate Period c. Hymns from the New Kingdom describe the god Amun , a mysterious power that lies behind even the other gods, as the ultimate source of this creative vision. The origin of humans is not a major feature of Egyptian creation stories.
In some texts the first humans spring from tears that Ra-Atum or his feminine aspect, the Eye of Ra , sheds in a moment of weakness and distress, foreshadowing humans' flawed nature and sorrowful lives. Others say humans are molded from clay by the god Khnum. But overall, the focus of the creation myths is the establishment of cosmic order rather than the special place of humans within it. In the period of the mythic past after the creation, Ra dwells on earth as king of the gods and of humans.
This period is the closest thing to a golden age in Egyptian tradition, the period of stability that the Egyptians constantly sought to evoke and imitate. Yet the stories about Ra's reign focus on conflicts between him and forces that disrupt his rule, reflecting the king's role in Egyptian ideology as enforcer of maat.
In an episode known in different versions from temple texts, some of the gods defy Ra's authority, and he destroys them with the help and advice of other gods like Thoth and Horus the Elder. The Eye goddess becomes angry with Ra and runs away from him, wandering wild and dangerous in the lands outside Egypt. Weakened by her absence, Ra sends one of the other gods—Shu, Thoth , or Anhur , in different accounts—to retrieve her, by force or persuasion.
Because the Eye of Ra is associated with the star Sothis , whose heliacal rising signaled the start of the Nile flood, the return of the Eye goddess to Egypt coincides with the life-giving inundation. Upon her return, the goddess becomes the consort of Ra or of the god who has retrieved her. Her pacification restores order and renews life. As Ra grows older and weaker, humanity, too, turns against him.
In an episode often called "The Destruction of Mankind", related in The Book of the Heavenly Cow , Ra discovers that humanity is plotting rebellion against him and sends his Eye to punish them.
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She slays many people, but Ra apparently decides that he does not want her to destroy all of humanity. He has beer dyed red to resemble blood and spreads it over the field.
The Eye goddess drinks the beer, becomes drunk, and ceases her rampage. Ra then withdraws into the sky, weary of ruling on earth, and begins his daily journey through the heavens and the Duat. The surviving humans are dismayed, and they attack the people among them who plotted against Ra. This event is the origin of warfare, death, and humans' constant struggle to protect maat from the destructive actions of other people.
In The Book of the Heavenly Cow , the results of the destruction of mankind seem to mark the end of the direct reign of the gods and of the linear time of myth. The beginning of Ra's journey is the beginning of the cyclical time of the present. Egyptian accounts give sequences of divine rulers who take the place of the sun god as king on earth, each reigning for many thousands of years.
Both of them face revolts that parallel those in the reign of the sun god, but the revolt that receives the most attention in Egyptian sources is the one in the reign of Geb's heir Osiris. The collection of episodes surrounding Osiris ' death and succession is the most elaborate of all Egyptian myths, and it had the most widespread influence in Egyptian culture. In some versions of the myth, Osiris is actually dismembered and the pieces of his corpse scattered across Egypt.
Osiris' sister and wife, Isis , finds her husband's body and restores it to wholeness. Isis then briefly revives Osiris to conceive an heir with him: The next portion of the myth concerns Horus' birth and childhood. Isis gives birth to and raises her son in secluded places, hidden from the menace of Set. The episodes in this phase of the myth concern Isis' efforts to protect her son from Set or other hostile beings, or to heal him from sickness or injury.
In these episodes Isis is the epitome of maternal devotion and a powerful practitioner of healing magic. In the third phase of the story, Horus competes with Set for the kingship. Their struggle encompasses a great number of separate episodes and ranges in character from violent conflict to a legal judgment by the assembled gods. For this reason, the Eye of Horus is a prominent symbol of life and well-being in Egyptian iconography.
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Because Horus is a sky god, with one eye equated with the sun and the other with the moon, the destruction and restoration of the single eye explains why the moon is less bright than the sun. Texts present two different resolutions for the divine contest: In the latter version, the ascension of Horus, Osiris' rightful heir, symbolizes the reestablishment of maat after the unrighteous rule of Set.
With order restored, Horus can perform the funerary rites for his father that are his duty as son and heir. Through this service Osiris is given new life in the Duat, whose ruler he becomes. The relationship between Osiris as king of the dead and Horus as king of the living stands for the relationship between every king and his deceased predecessors. Osiris, meanwhile, represents the regeneration of life. On earth he is credited with the annual growth of crops, and in the Duat he is involved in the rebirth of the sun and of deceased human souls.
Although Horus to some extent represents any living pharaoh, he is not the end of the lineage of ruling gods. He is succeeded first by gods and then by spirits that represent dim memories of Egypt's Predynastic rulers, the souls of Nekhen and Pe. They link the entirely mythical rulers to the final part of the sequence, the lineage of Egypt's historical kings. Several disparate Egyptian texts address a similar theme: The earliest known appearance of such a story does not appear to be a myth but an entertaining folktale, found in the Middle Kingdom Westcar Papyrus , about the birth of the first three kings of Egypt's Fifth Dynasty.
In that story, the three kings are the offspring of Ra and a human woman. The same theme appears in a firmly religious context in the New Kingdom, when the rulers Hatshepsut , Amenhotep III , and Ramesses II depicted in temple reliefs their own conception and birth, in which the god Amun is the father and the historical queen the mother. By stating that the king originated among the gods and was deliberately created by the most important god of the period, the story gives a mythical background to the king's coronation, which appears alongside the birth story.
The divine connection legitimizes the king's rule and provides a rationale for his role as intercessor between gods and humans.
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Similar scenes appear in many post-New Kingdom temples, but this time the events they depict involve the gods alone. In this period, most temples were dedicated to a mythical family of deities, usually a father, mother, and son. In these versions of the story, the birth is that of the son in each triad.
This shift in focus from the human king to the gods who are associated with him reflects a decline in the status of the pharaoh in the late stages of Egyptian history. Ra's movements through the sky and the Duat are not fully narrated in Egyptian sources, [89] although funerary texts like the Amduat , Book of Gates , and Book of Caverns relate the nighttime half of the journey in sequences of vignettes.
In traveling across the sky, Ra brings light to the earth, sustaining all things that live there. He reaches the peak of his strength at noon and then ages and weakens as he moves toward sunset. In the evening, Ra takes the form of Atum, the creator god, oldest of all things in the world. According to early Egyptian texts, at the end of the day he spits out all the other deities, whom he devoured at sunrise. Here they represent the stars, and the story explains why the stars are visible at night and seemingly absent during the day.
At sunset Ra passes through the akhet , the horizon, in the west. At times the horizon is described as a gate or door that leads to the Duat. At others, the sky goddess Nut is said to swallow the sun god, so that his journey through the Duat is likened to a journey through her body. These images are symbolic of the awesome and enigmatic nature of the Duat, where both the gods and the dead are renewed by contact with the original powers of creation.
Indeed, although Egyptian texts avoid saying it explicitly, Ra's entry into the Duat is seen as his death. Certain themes appear repeatedly in depictions of the journey. Ra overcomes numerous obstacles in his course, representative of the effort necessary to maintain maat. The greatest challenge is the opposition of Apep , a serpent god who represents the destructive aspect of disorder, and who threatens to destroy the sun god and plunge creation into chaos.
In contrast, his enemies—people who have undermined maat —are tormented and thrown into dark pits or lakes of fire. The key event in the journey is the meeting of Ra and Osiris. In the New Kingdom, this event developed into a complex symbol of the Egyptian conception of life and time. Osiris, relegated to the Duat, is like a mummified body within its tomb. Ra, endlessly moving, is like the ba , or soul, of a deceased human, which may travel during the day but must return to its body each night.
When Ra and Osiris meet, they merge into a single being. Their pairing reflects the Egyptian vision of time as a continuous repeating pattern, with one member Osiris being always static and the other Ra living in a constant cycle. Once he has united with Osiris' regenerative power, Ra continues on his journey with renewed vitality.
Ancient Egyptian creation myths
At this moment, the rising sun god swallows the stars once more, absorbing their power. Egyptian texts typically treat the dissolution of the world as a possibility to be avoided, and for that reason they do not often describe it in detail. However, many texts allude to the idea that the world, after countless cycles of renewal, is destined to end. This end is described in a passage in the Coffin Texts and a more explicit one in the Book of the Dead , in which Atum says that he will one day dissolve the ordered world and return to his primeval, inert state within the waters of chaos. All things other than the creator will cease to exist, except Osiris, who will survive along with him.
Because the Egyptians rarely described theological ideas explicitly, the implicit ideas of mythology formed much of the basis for Egyptian religion. The purpose of Egyptian religion was the maintenance of maat , and the concepts that myths express were believed to be essential to maat. The rituals of Egyptian religion were meant to make the mythic events, and the concepts they represented, real once more, thereby renewing maat.
For this reason, Egyptian rituals often included actions that symbolized mythical events.